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I think one of the things that bothers me the most about
radical/critical academics in the general failure/refusal to engage not in class analysis (because many nominally do that) but in considering their own class position, class orientation, and class aspirations.
radical/critical academics in the general failure/refusal to engage not in class analysis (because many nominally do that) but in considering their own class position, class orientation, and class aspirations.
I got my PhD, and now am contract faculty trying to get full-time work, and so I try to be readily aware of that entire complex. And I also try to live by my values, by what I actually believe in and not become entrapped in it. Insofar as we are all in it, and not just of it.
I don't talk about it a lot but I was actually offered a tenure-track position at a major canadian institution about a year ago, and I turned it down because to take it would have meant, in no small way, to compromise with what I value politically, ethically, personally, etc.
And I am far from perfect. But I try my best in the context that I am in. I see far too many "radical" or "critical" academics who are far too content to let their professed beliefs or topics of engagement perform their radicality or criticality for them.
It's this practice where the belief itself in anti-capitalism, or decoloniality, or whatever else is itself enough, and thus renders inert their day-to-day actual practice of embeddedness in, and performing for, an ineluctably oppressive and exploitative institution.
I've been thinking about this a lot since that job offer last January and finishing my degree last February, and I think this is why even so may nominally radical/critical academics I know get so uncomfortable when I say something like "abolish the university, loot the library."
Or why people look at me really screw eyed when I tell them "I don't care about academic publishing, I make everything I write available for free on my blog." Or when I tell them I turned that job down because I hold to things that are more valuable to me.
Because so many of them, regardless of how much they profess an adherence to this or that critical thought, are fully oriented towards not only the university as such, but its furtherance, institutionally and in their class.
And I mean this across the board. It doesn't matter one iota in my experience what identity category one is of. Their daily lived practice shows the actual orientation of their values, and no amount of letting critical theory perform radicalness for you changes that.
But anyway, as you know, I can't wrap shit up to save my life, so that's that [insert Porky Pig gif]
