The University, or Teaching Real Fucking Shit

Greetings, audient!

This.. was... a long one. We each have our own scar tissue from university encounters, passionate moments of transformation and inspiration experienced alongside sad encounters with hopelessness, mediocrity and slave morality. So this one was more personal.

The state of the University - as an institution, as a public good - has been in free fall for quite a while, well before contemporary dictators started slamming it down more forcefully (bullies invariably go for the weaker targets). In this episode we try to think of the university through the prisms of  democracy, political economy and, not least, metaphysics. 

The university today is seeing more and more threats to its relevance (and a fortriori, funding). The younger generations see this establishment as a "waste of taxpayer money," as something best left alone or left to Automated Intelligence (AI) devices, or left in the past. We try and trace this scarcity of the university as the stronghold of learning and teaching as a value in itself, one facing towards the future with hope and pride. 

Sagi takes the university to task for their theological roots and the Christian, metaphysically anti-Judaic ethos of Truth that has come to pervade (and pervert) it, for being anti-Judaic compels us, foundationally and methodologically, to value truth over justice (which comes, as Nietzsche had already pointed out, to a radical devaluation of value as such). 

Andy shares with us his bittersweet travels through ivy-league woke Humanities departments, the various petty egoisms that animate it in a kind of pathetic posturing and grandiloquence that settles for crumbs of value and importance. He brings up wokeism as a kind of rot that has taken over the Humanities. 

Andy's dog shared his sentiments.

Addressing these issues requires, as Jake reminds us, being slow and careful. For, though it may look like the academic jobifications and woke-rots that proliferate today mark the closure, the end of the university's horizons (especially when "debated" on 'social media'), the need for critical thinking, for creating and enriching discourse and understanding of life and experience, are still at the core of this institution. Jacques Derrida, that many see as supporting an oblivious gutting of the university's functions and ideals, is actually an example of responsibility; to trace our current experience to where the university's original, however fantastic, ethos still holds sway, power, pride, and can still nourish value.

Jack, out proud representative of the STEM disciplines, points out the lack of co-authorships in the Humanities, following a capitalist logic of branding that turns the scholar humble. Jack calls it a humiliation ritual, and Sagi was quick to interject Max Weber's critiques of the professionalization and "rationalization" of scholarship, and the Bildung they inflict on the scholar: the latter trains the scholar for hopeless work, churning publications as a vehicle for promoting one's brand, making scholarly experts follow a logic of monopoly and "cornering a market (of ideas)" rather than enriching the understanding or cross-pollinating with other university discourses in order to think differently about life, the universe, and everything...

There's much more, of course. Dare a listen.

Stars: WWJD, Pervs 'R Us; Marx Grudge