Good essay. Michael Hudson's concluding paragraph sums up the problem with American universities as "like Congress... basing their policy on attracting contributions from their donors... the academic equivalent of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling."
As Hudson knows, the problem runs deeper than that, in particular implicating the "Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex" that has united Democrats and Republicans in fealty to the national security state since World War II. Eisenhower's naming of the threat in his farewell speech was too little and too late. But the problem with universities also involves their role as sorting and selecting apparatus for elite positions in the division of labour. André Gorz addressed this aspect in his 1970 essay, "Destroy the University." As he wrote 54 years ago, "[w]e must thus combat reforms, in their effects and in their conception, not because they are dangerous, but because they are illusory." University administrations' cringing and cowering before Congressional inquisitors and their self-serving readiness to call in the cops to quash protests show that Gorz was right. Universities' core function has become its role in mediating and legitimating a division of labour that has become increasingly inequitable and unjust, not in spite of university education but *because* of it. The universities' role in perpetuating social domination is facilitated and enforced by the "endowments" that marry university administrators to capital as administrators of capital. It is a propitious time to revisit Gorz's critique of the university, which I have posted at my blog (with better formatting than Marxist Internet Archive). I have also added comments about how Gorz's critique of the university fits into his writing on political ecology and the future of work. SEIZE THE MEANS OF INSTRUCTION! <https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2024/04/seize-means-of-instruction.html> Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#30148): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/30148 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/105814929/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
