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RegretLeft's avatar

Just here from El Gato (commented on your "federalism" comment) - So much substack/so little time! - most days I am bookmarking 2 or 3 additional substack sites. I am printing this out for careful reading. I wanted to spend my life in "the academy" but got booted out in the first job crash of the 1980s. Now? - I am so happy not to have found a place there; imagine reaching retirement age and looking around and seeing the sort of place you were leaving; the place you had dedicated your professional life to ... it must be SO depressing!

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I read it. Much more depressing than I expected.

I had formed an image of the current academy; sort of an updated “two cultures” configuration (are you old enough to remember that famous debate circa 1950s?) - in which one culture was the “departments” (especially the science tech depts) – the academic side of the house - sort of keeping the other culture (the administration – with its fast expanding DIE bureaucracy) at arm’s length. That would be the “ticking the box” approach you raise.

But no? - Not at all? - No arm’s length – but full and genuine acceptance by the academics? By which, for example, a person who has spent much of his life reading; whose livelihood depends on it – can only scoff at the tragedy of blindness with “ablelist” one liners?!

Depressing.

You say very little about COVID. And the way, that after a couple decades of preparation, the academy embraced in a death grip like way that operation – every.single.one.of.them! … Sort of a dream come true way of enhancing the totalitarian grip. The masks in particular now make more sense to me: a fully visible (rather than merely verbal / cognitive) way of signaling compliance and submission.

Did you hear of the North Korean refugee?– graduated from Harvard last spring (as I recall) and then remarked (probably on social media) – re: Harvard: “North Korea wasn’t as crazy as this”.

Ha! I thought, amusing hyperbole. But no. She meant it quite literally.

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