In the neoliberal university, there seems to be a pathological disdain for community, trust and collaboration. As the bounds of sociality and social responsibility are undermined all that is left is a kind of sordid careerism, and the quest for status and some financial crumbs from corporations and defense contractors. What remains is the insufferable cultural capital of academics bounded by the private orbits and self-interests in which they live. These are academics who have surrendered to a regime of conformity and instrumental rationality while reducing politics to a private endeavor. At their most cartoonish moment, they appear to inhabit a kind of cultural capital made visible by their desire to tattoo an Oxford degree on their foreheads and speak with a British ruling-class accent. Academia is now overwhelmed by reclusive boundaries of the private, the irrelevant and the loss of solidarity. Rigor, public scholarship and integrity are in short supply in these departments. So is sanity. Under such circumstances, exile seems less like a reprieve than a revitalized kind of public space where a new language, understanding of politics and new forms of solidarity can be nurtured among the displaced, the othered and those who refuse the neoliberal machinery of social and political death that now defines education as a source of profit and mode of commerce.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 22:52:56 +0000
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