Late night thoughts:

Universities existed before capitalism. Universities exist/ed in monarchies, under communism, in capitalist societies, in socialist societies, in every type of society.

Universities are, in their idealized form, communities of learning. /1

Universities we know do not exist in an idealized form. They can be problematic, repressive, reflecting societal problems and structural oppressions of every kind.

Universities often restrict and police what kind of learning can be done and by whom. Universities are not ideal.

Both can be true at the same time: universities can be a refuge, places of transformation, innovation, and dreaming, places that preserve and nurture knowledge, cites of oppression and exclusion, cites of exploitation and erasure.

Universities, like societies, are complex.

It is not a contradiction to want to be a part of a long history of learning, to want to be a part of a system that exists, at least conceptually, alongside regimes of all kinds; it is necessary to critique universities, to reform them from within and without, make them better.

We should recognize that in our late capitalist moment in the US, universities are inseparable from capitalist pressures and paradigms, that many university upper administration forget why we love(d) universities and endlessly chase the bottom line and discuss human capital --

-- and it's more than justified to walk away from modern US universities feeling that the dream does not exist, or has become so corrupt as to be worthless; and it's more than justified to fight for a better future at our universities, and/or a better future for learning.

I am saying all this because earlier today, a prominent alt-ac coach who tweets as the professorisin (not linking) posted how people should never adjunct, and there was discussion of that. Look; maybe. I don't know. I studied on three continents, under different political systems

I remember the joy of discovering, as an undergrad, languages that ceased being spoken hundreds of years ago. I remember researching, as an undergrad, medieval translations from Arabic and Hebrew into East Slavic and there was nothing better than this - still kind of isn't;

...it's not something that you can convert into capitalist productivity, it is not about incomes and retirement plans; and all I can say that I was an immigrant and I was very poor, and I could have done something very different with my life, but that joy will not ever be wrong.

I am concerned that that joy is not a thing anymore, that students are burdened with loans and stress and faculty (marginalized faculty especially) are embattled and stressed; and it all might not last, at least not for particular people, because late capitalism is terrible;

but tomorrow I will begin a new semester via zoom, because it's the pandemic and I will tell my students about language trees, and kvetch that Indo-European is more researched than Proto-Afro-Asiatic and why -

- and we will learn about the ancient precursors to modern alphabets, and languages spoken thousands of years before late capitalism, and maybe it won't help students get a job at a bank and save up for avocado toast, but knowledge is its own fierce joy.

Now I do need to say that I'm autistic, and there's never been and will never be anything better than linguistics, except poetry, and certain prose, and it's impossible to do all of it in a lifetime, and capitalism is not a joke and I am very, very tired.
But yes. Still love it.

Does any of this cancel any of the shit that goes on in universities, any of the oppression, pressure, erasure, marginalization? Heck no, the systems we have in the US are broken. And none of this also cancels the destruction of the public universities. But still.