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Campus creepers

By Owen Paine on Friday October 19, 2007 12:34 PM

Academic freedom? Fuck it. Why should academics have any more freedom than the rest of us? I can foresee the day when you'll have only one of two “life-style” choices, for most of us, here in Mount Hillary America:

1) Go by day to a corporate feel-freaky concentration camp, and spend the rump of your day compensating; or

2) Drop out and blow about in dead-leaf freedom.

And that'll be it -- unless you attend a super-duper multinational higher-ed gig.

What brought this attack of dyspepsia on was something I just read, about the ever more endangered life of free birds on campus. Its author was mostly ticked off by Israel's grim turn-all-to-lead reach into the ivy patch:

http://counterpunch.com/makdisi10182007.html

Over the past few years, Israel's U.S. defenders have stepped up their campaign by establishing a network of institutions... dedicated to the task of monitoring our campuses and bringing pressure to bear on those critical of Israeli policies.... they have severely disrupted academic processes, the free function of which once made American universities the envy of the world.
The author, one Saree Makdisi, is, of course a professor herself. But you probably guessed that. Only professors have such a high opinion of Academia.

I say, "so fuckin' what?" Those hallowed bells of freedom never chime when the order of class battle is really drawn. One word: McCarthy.

So to hell with the liberal university scene.

If we've seen through the notion of a broadly prosperous post industrial Amerika, salvation, my fellow midget Americans, awaits us regular folks in a post university America.

Attention, future choice shoppers! Now available in aisle one! The fast and ever faster a-buildin' American economy, where brave and clever third-degreed gimps imagineeer us homers all into nano-bounty.

Now ruminate on this nugget: where do these gimps get bred?

Yup, both the hearts and minds ready to hatch out this blade runner future, are now housed inside Amerca's leading universities. Pure creation, suave recreation, planned procreation, and the ultimate grail, near immortality... for the meritoriously worthy.

It's all gettin' cooked up, certified, property-stamped, and shipped out globe-wide, from right inside the new universal Church Of Patented Science, whose global tithe will be IP royalties.

Grab your torches and pitchforks, fellow peasants, and pay a visit to your local branch of Frankenstein U., Inc. Up there, on the cloud-shrouded maountaintop, among the sloping swards and shady sycamores, the evil Doctors are probing the secrets of life – with a view to appropriating them. If you want any life at all, haul those freaks out of their lab, pronto.

Comments (10)

op:

as the rising burger wave sacked the monastery
shall we not now in turn
do our historic mission
and
sack these secular heavens on earth as well ??

rabelais dreamed them up
----the abbey theleme i think he called
his utopic community of happy privileged
endowed refined terminally curious hedonics --- but fuck he was usually
jocking and kidding
and pretending .....and dead drunk

StO:

Shit! Do we have to execute the mathematicians?

MJS:

Execute 'em? Naaah. Just don't let 'em patent anything.

StO:

Are proofs of theorems still OK?

op:

proofs of theorems ok ??

yes... so long as no one worships them

as platonic gods

Scruggs:

I'm quite fond of letting market forces take full control of the economics departments, especially at the University of Chicago, where the faculty has the best credentials for experiencing the experiment. Urine samples, weekly orientation videos and computer supervised multiple choice personality tests would take care of the other departments.

op:

scruggs
as vice deputy chief recruiter
for higher-ED red guard unit 17

i'm authorized to offer u
the position
of ACTING STRUGGLE CZAR
for the u of chi campus

the top comrades
up there at RGRH
(regular guy revolutionary headquaters)
have nixed
doc smiff
the obvious first best choice

seems "THEY " suspect
" comrade father"
has too much " doe like fondness "
for aspects of his alma mater
to carry out the task
with sufficient "careful expedition "

op:

ps
brother scruggs btw
i'll be buy to personally collect .."the samples"
come the time

MJS:

Owen -- NOW you've gone too far. Doe-like fondness! For Alma Mater! The only university I loathe more than my Alma Mater is yours. Oh, and maybe Princeton, on account
of Woodrow Wilson.

op:

father does this mean
i can't play tiny tim any more
at your pantless Dickens
xmas revel ???

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