I want this T-shirt!

Skool Sux

Here’s a draft of a much longer piece I’m planning to write on my childhood — an idea that came about due to the incident I describe in what follows.

Spook speaks…

The great Prince Paddy makes his voice heard on disinfo.com regarding their legendary chatroom(RIP) *wipes tear from eye*:

http://www.disinfo.com/content/story.php?title=To-All-Lonesome-Lost-Disinfo-Chat-Refugees—-1

Bloody Students

I was left raging and in utter dismay last Sunday evening on reading about the thuggish forced eviction of the participants of the Nottingham University sit-in for Gaza by uniformed goons sent in by the university.

You can see footage and interviews here.

Reading the comments left by people on the Nottingham occupation blog, all of them sharing the same anger and alarm that I had felt on hearing the news, I recognised that there was also deep concern that this brutal reaction by the university authorities to what had been an extremely peaceful protest was a symptom of deeper trends that taken together posed a serious challenge to what I had always assumed the main role of a university should be.

You see, I had stupidly assumed that universities were supposed to provide an environment where people were encouraged to think for themselves, to develop the ability to challenge and to critically evaluate claims made by others in whatever field of inquiry. When you went to university I naively thought that you were given the opportunity, the privilege, to be part of and contribute to a distinctive culture where challenges to intellectual authority weren’t just tolerated but were openly encouraged.

But, even if my prior convictions were insanely idealistic they still capture enough of the past perception of the role of universities in society not to be dismissed as completely misguided. Nowadays however these institutions are taking on more and more of the status of adjuncts of big business, and consequently the emphasis has largely shifted from creating intellectual wealth to creating monetary wealth and on a closer alignment to industry.

Now, businesses and corporations in general have a very narrow, limited view of innovation and an even narrower view of the spirit of independent disintrested inquiry, because in order to preserve their viability the bottom line for them will always be “what is the profit margin?”. So that the self-interested drive for profit of the shareholders invariably takes precedence over whatever inherent worth there might be in creating novelty, or preserving what is good and true …or human rights, or even, given the environmental catastrophe looming ahead of all of us, the medium term prospects for humanity’s existence on this planet.

Indeed for the most part the human quality businesses and corporations most value in their employees and in society all large — viewed as a pool of consumers and future employees — is a blank unquestioning conformity. And this is now inevitably spilling over into the running of universities via the managerial caste who are in charge of everything and whose most effective, most cherished tool is the marketing strategy.

Nottingham University, especially, prides itself on its arse licking proximity to business (the fact that it was The Times Educational Supplement’s Entrepreneurial University of the year is proudly and prominently displayed on all the entrances to the main campus). This servility has several consequences: for one the research carried out across the different departments becomes increasingly tied into the practical needs of industry; but worst of all is the way the culture of submissiveness and conformity affects Nottingham’s largely apathetic student body.

Universities now almost solely market themselves to potential students as a first stepping stone en route to a corporate career, i.e., as an investment the student is making to get a job in a few years time; I guess promoting them as hotbeds of critical thinking or even as primarily institutions of learning wouldn’t appeal to many people now — which is why you’re more likely to see mentions of a vibrant nightlife and great sports facilities in their prospectuses.

So most students matriculate with the accurate expectation that they’ll spend the next three or four years in a self-obsessed hedonistic haze of drink, drugs and sex, with a little time set aside for academic work. Few I suspect turn up to enrolment expecting to spend the next few years being challenged in their own beliefs as well as being systematically encouraged to, in Timothy Leary’s words “think for yourself and question authority”. (That taking shit loads of drugs doesn’t make you anymore politically open minded or aware can be ascertained by talking to the drugged up, permanently zoned out, monkeys that inhabit the deoxy.com chatrooms. Try starting up a conversation about politics that doesn’t involve the legalisation of drugs or some insane conspiracy theory and see the clueless reaction.)

A student body consisting of young people most of whom can’t find better things to do with their free time than spending every night getting drunk or stoned or going to clubs and then sitting on buses honking on about the previous night’s debauches and who are convinced politics is boring and irrelevant into the bargain, is ultimately going to be a passive student body which will go on to make nice pliant consumers and employees.

Student culture these days eschews any hint of radicalism or idealism like it was the most unfashionable kind of plague, in its place is a sort of brainless consumerist excess and materialism sponsored and mandated by huge drinks companies and glossy club franchises, all marketed with an excessive sort of smug cynicism. Ours is the age of perma-irony. The fact that it’s all so fake doesn’t seem to bother anyone, and only a diminishing few make the defiant effort to seek out the few pockets of independence that still exist outside the mainstream. The counter culture, and its symbols and its enthusiasms have been well and truly co-opted.

This suits the university authorities well enough, gives them sufficient leeway to crack down on any displays of disobedience that threaten to disrupt and challenge the status quo, that threaten their delivery of performance targets as the Gaza sit in did, with brutality and harshness, safe in the knowledge most of the rest of the students on campus won’t respond with too much outrage or sympathy. Everything is back to normal, and running smoothly again, no need to worry, go back to sleep. The fact is that all the battles the last few generations thought had been won in the 60s turn out only to have been temporary victories, and the evidence strongly suggests they need to be fought all over again

Now I understand perfectly well that universities can’t just exist as elite ivory towers, undemocratic institutions catering for a small privileged class of bureacrats and intellectuals, immune from the effects of the forces that shape everyday existence, but such a craven obsequiousness to big business seriously threatens the autonomy of institutions whose very raison d’etre should be to foster a shared sense of intellectual freedom.

Division Day

There was a grown man dying from fright
So surprised by the things he’d say
With a giant fantasy life
Running around on feet of clay

Naked except for a perpetual debt
That couldn’t be stripped away
An unrightable wrong that moved him along
Closer to division day

Spent a long time living with that
Never could give it a name
And when you don’t know what you’re looking at
It makes it much harder to take

Mostly they’d meet when he was asleep
And have some sick exchange
That stuck him as wrong and moved him along
Closer to division day

I can’t make an exception for a bad connection
That only goes one way
Sell out for a song where I don’t belong
With you on division day

The moon stood up on the ridge
Looking down where the water shines
And a man looking over the bridge
Like he done so many times

Thinking about how to stay out
Out of trouble’s way
And flying to fall away from you all
It’s over division day
Beautiful division day

Thinking about how to stay out
Out of trouble’s way
Flying to fall away from you all
It’s over division day
Beautiful division day

Important

Please visit this site and lend your support to the cause:

http://occupationnottingham.wordpress.com/