Comments on: The red flags of the stubborn https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/01/25/the-red-flags-of-the-stubborn/ critical anthropology of academic culture Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:43:30 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.1 By: decasia: critique of academic culture » “Our profession does not easily accommodate resignation” https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/01/25/the-red-flags-of-the-stubborn/#comment-1191 Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:43:30 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1138#comment-1191 […] considerations, persists in marching every Monday in front of the Ministry. I said in my previous post about them that I was going to translate their tract, so now you (anglophones) can all have another […]

]]> By: zach https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/01/25/the-red-flags-of-the-stubborn/#comment-1190 Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:17:54 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1138#comment-1190 I probably think it’s problematic for some of the same reasons you do. (Knowledge as use-value? For whom? What about those involved in knowledge production only indirectly? How is this a break from pre-neoliberal modes of university organization and governance – how do we move beyond without trying to move backwards towards something we can’t reclaim and probably shouldn’t want to do so, etc?)

I’d be interested to read your translation of the manifesto, and yes, I’d be up for more reading group stuff.

]]> By: eli https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/01/25/the-red-flags-of-the-stubborn/#comment-1189 Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:11:30 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1138#comment-1189 Nice to hear from you, Zach. Yes, there certainly is a difference of opinion over what universities should be for, with the government being in favor of increasing integration with the work world and generally, you know, reshaping universities to enhance France’s economic competitiveness. (They usually say something about cultural and social and scientific objectives too, but there’s less actual policy reform directed towards noneconomic objectives, as far as I can tell.) And protestors often defend — in ways that to my eyes are seldom really well thought through — a vision of a university where “knowledge is a value in itself.” (We can get into what I think is problematic about this if you want.)

The question you raise, though, is about the relation between these kinds of university visions and the question of politicization. Honestly, I think it’s empirically hard here to map out this relation, because often the people who want to politicize university policy are precisely the ones who want to see the university reimagined through some kind of process of debate that hasn’t happened yet. As if they were politicizing in the name of a future concept of the university that doesn’t yet have a lot of positive shape. I should post my translation of the manifesto from last summer about the politicization of the university — I’d love to hear your thoughts on that text. Anyway, are we going to do more of this reading group stuff soon I hope? Eli m. said so.

]]> By: zach https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2010/01/25/the-red-flags-of-the-stubborn/#comment-1188 Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:40:27 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1138#comment-1188 The struggle over what’s intelligible as a political struggle seems particularly important in academic contexts, where so much blood is spilled over who gets to efine the institution’s relationship to its imagined exteriority, ho gets to map what gown means to town, what work the university does in the world, etc. I wonder if part of this struggle over the intelligibility of the political winds up being about also a struggle over what universities do and for whom they do it, though typing this it seems fairly obvious. In any event, this is really interesting.

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