The purpose of bourgeois academia is reproducing bourgeois culture. That fact doesn’t negate the exploitation of academic workers or erase the persecution that some teachers and students experience for advocating revolutionary and anti imperialist ideas.
It does mean that liberal academia as an institution is incapable of going beyond reform for exactly the same reason that bourgeois electoralism is incapable of going beyond reform. The reason individual students and teachers are singled out isn’t because their behavior is uniquely threatening or revolutionary, it’s because it’s seen as a betrayal of the foundation of liberal academic institutions by their peers.
What’s being bashed here is the petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic class character of liberal academics, not whatever superficial hodgepodge of American TV-brained nonsense is repeated by people that haven’t seen the inside of a college campus in over 40 years, if ever.
Justifying is part of it, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough that people believe in liberalism in an abstract sense, they have to be trained to go out into the world and take jobs maintaining and expanding the machinery of empire. It’s why elite private universities have the prestige that they do. It’s not that learning is valued for its own sake, or that these institutions do a better job at distributing knowledge. It’s that these institutions have the best track record of producing the future imperial ruling class. Nobody tries to get into the best school they can because they think they’ll learn better, they do it to maximize their potential class mobility.
The purpose of bourgeois academia is reproducing bourgeois culture. That fact doesn’t negate the exploitation of academic workers or erase the persecution that some teachers and students experience for advocating revolutionary and anti imperialist ideas.
It does mean that liberal academia as an institution is incapable of going beyond reform for exactly the same reason that bourgeois electoralism is incapable of going beyond reform. The reason individual students and teachers are singled out isn’t because their behavior is uniquely threatening or revolutionary, it’s because it’s seen as a betrayal of the foundation of liberal academic institutions by their peers.
What’s being bashed here is the petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic class character of liberal academics, not whatever superficial hodgepodge of American TV-brained nonsense is repeated by people that haven’t seen the inside of a college campus in over 40 years, if ever.
Reproducing? Or justifying.
Because I would argue justifying.
Justifying is part of it, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough that people believe in liberalism in an abstract sense, they have to be trained to go out into the world and take jobs maintaining and expanding the machinery of empire. It’s why elite private universities have the prestige that they do. It’s not that learning is valued for its own sake, or that these institutions do a better job at distributing knowledge. It’s that these institutions have the best track record of producing the future imperial ruling class. Nobody tries to get into the best school they can because they think they’ll learn better, they do it to maximize their potential class mobility.