Rachel and the Revolution

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) publishes just about anything from Guest Bloggers these days. As an example, Rachel Ida Buff, is quite certain that the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Popular University for Palestine Coalition (UWMPUPC) “encampments represent the true and best hope for the university.” 

Who knows, maybe this blip on the radar of the higher education institution (HEI) model of university and college higher education (HE) service providers will finally manage to bring real, lasting change to… Ha! Ha! Ya, right!! Ever hear of Berkeley? And though Rachel concludes with a reference to 1968 Paris, why not Kent, as it predates and took place in the USA? No catchy phrases? Just more dead people at the doorstep of HE.

Rachel’s post is foreshadowed by one on this blog from over ten years ago, updated in 2022. It describes a day in the life of someone who works in the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model for HE that I have created. She’s a mom raising two kids on her own, and during an eventful day she reflects on the great faculty-student uprising, on the “education encampments” that overthrew the old (dare I say it?) colonial institutional model of HE, making possible her independent professional life as an academic and mother.

But, sure, let’s go ahead and rock that real true best hope, of saving institutions, with something thrown in about proper HE and individual flourishment.

Retreat or Reform or Revolt or WTFE

I posted a comment on Rachel’s Academe Blog article, asking if, when having notable academic exchanges with members of the encampment, or when the two weeks of encampment seemed “way too short, with so much more learning and teaching and organizing to do…,” I wonder if at any time, did this historian, did this academic think: That’s enough. I’m finally going to do it. No more of this obstructive, abusive, unnecessary institutional inheritance. Time to quit my faculty job, open my own professional academic practice in history and start selling my higher education expertise to students who…. Ha! Ha! Ya, right! Just try to earn a living providing HE services for credit toward recognized degree from without the HEI monopoly on HE.

That’s not the model in which Rachel works. No academic works in such a profession. It’s fiction. The HEI model does not allow academics to practice HE as professionals do in law or medicine. It has built-in barriers that prevent academics from exercising their right earn a living by contributing to the HE social contract via a complex investment in career and community. Though a viable corrective for this rights violation and so much else that plagues the HEI model, PSA will remain a fiction so as long as there are people like Rachel who write rubbish like this and organizations like the AAUP who print it.

In comment, I said: Speaking to the (academic) historian, the (faculty) employee and the (human) being, you are aware of the authoritarian uses to which universities and colleges have been put across the globe, including recently in the case of the UWMPUPC or for nearly a century across the People’s Republic of China. So, why is it that you want to work for and to save the university? How would doing so help the UWMPUPC cause, in a way that doesn’t also help the authoritarian causes and uses of these institutions? To paraphrase a favorite comedian, Eddie Izzard, how does the UWMPUPC cause help or hinder a mass-murdering-fuckhead cause like that of the Chinese Communist Party? Under the direction of the UWMPUPC, would the new and improved institution continue to flex authoritarian power in a struggle with individuals? Go ahead, promise me that would not happen. We must try to see beyond the legacy of the HEI model. As academics, it is or duty to do so.

Put another way, get your heads out of your collective asses! The obvious logical step is to remove the offending party to the social contract, especially when that party is an accident of history. But it seems the rest of the academy doesn't think this institutional disease has yet progressed enough to warrant excision, though the patient is clearly critical and the family deeply disturbed. We DO NOT NEED universities and colleges, and NEVER have NEEDED them. Unless you can see this, you are of no interest to me.

The UWMPUPC managed to get several concessions from one of these abusive inheritances, notice please, not from the faculty, but from the institutional employer of faculty, who provide HE service to students, who…are you paying attention? This is fucking amusing:

"The students negotiated as best they could, winning concessions that were impossible before the encampment movement commenced in April. The resulting agreement contains administrative affirmation of support for a ceasefire in the Israeli genocide against Gaza, acknowledgement of the scholasticide, the destruction of schools, universities, and libraries taking place there, as well as important local concessions towards university divestment from support of Israel and weapons manufacture. Students took down the encampment in time for the campus to be swept clean for graduation next weekend. It was a big win."

The darlings did their best, which turns out to be achieving what would otherwise have been impossible. Except for the obvious Love-Is-a-Fallacy glitch, this is a nice, tidy ending, or beginning. I can almost hear, “That’s a wrap, Bob!” But like Dobie's loves, the golden age of HE is long gone and there's convincing reason to think it never was.

Meanwhile the world is burning and otherwise intelligent people are trying to teach unnecessary institutions some sort of lesson in humility and humanity. Are you people for real!? The history of the HEI model will teach you this lesson: comically, universities and colleges are remarkably challenged learners and like so many dimwits, they think themselves at the head of the class, while as far as humanity goes, well, that’s the tragedy, but look and judge for yourself. I’m constantly taking a piss on them. But a lack of knowledge relevant to the cause is the least of their troubles. Short of brain damage and with one minute to spare, Rachel and the Revolution might have noticed that the horrors of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee run much deeper and wider than collaboration with Israel.

I clocked 28.84 seconds of research to discover what only a complete ass-hat would bet against: UWM having ties to the Communist Party of China (CCP). On the UWM website there are pages of praise and pride for collaboration with the CCP. In 2019, Chancellor Blank, posted a letter that remains. He waxes on about 100 years of productive institutional collaboration with the CCP and the hundreds of UWM Chinese citizen alums back in the Motherland, sporting the 海归 hashtag:

There is growing concern about security issues with China, particularly around intellectual property. We need to be smart and respectful in all of our international collaborations. Full transparency and disclosure will benefit all partners and everyone involved in collaborative research projects.

But I am proud of the number of scholars at UW – both US citizens and citizens of other countries – who have ties to China, and I support the work that they do.

Fucking clown. Or worse, collaborator. When it comes to oppression, occupation, rape, extortion, ethnocide, torture, corruption, murder, and WTFE-inhumanity, the CCP is in a league of its own, even when you consider that the league legacy traces the long violent, oppressive, divisive history of the Chinese people. If you ever make it to the great geography, nation, country, encampment, lair, it should be, people called China, be sure to visit the longest cemetery in the world (一定记得去世界上最长的公墓看看). The souls there are a testament to the breathtaking beauty of authoritarianism. What Blank calls “full transparency and disclosure,” his CCP-appointed counterpart at Peking University calls, whatever the guy with the tank says (有枪的说了算).

Get your heads out of your asses! There’s far too much at stake for everyone!

(An interactive infographic: https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/3139331/ccp-100year-anniversary/index.html)

In stride with the common practice of walking a fine line between pawn and person, I will continue to rely on the conflict and suffering of people to make yet another point. One I believe is ultimately, if not immediately, in the service of all. Sitting in the agora, let’s assume Israel has killed 50,000 Palestinians since 1948, or ten times this at 500,000 deaths – an obviously false figure, which we might multiple by another ten, with no impact on my reasoning.

Here is another number, also speculative, but far more realistic. It's a benchmark that any historian or activist for the amelioration of global suffering through HEI reform should keep in their pocket, like a penny, prayer, or party hat: The CCP has killed around 100 million people in the past 100 years, the vast majority not in times of war with others, but in disappearing, imprisoning, impoverishing, torturing, addicting, grieving, starving, bleeding, and shooting-in-the-head-on-Tuesday the life out of their own people, though not exclusively. It continues today, right-fucking-now! And this is just the death, forget the overwhelming sea of suffering. Also forget the fact that Chinese people and global citizens are increasingly under the threat of authoritarian brutality from CCP courtesans and their new Emperor in old clothes. This figure alone represents one million people every year who are actually killed by a government that has never been elected by its victims and which cannot be removed by any official democratic or legal means........as every soul on the planet looks to the Dragon's Chair (龙椅 Long-Yi) and the Caveman on it, surrounded by fleets of golden gilded Teslas and tanks.

In the end, that great sage of the stage might have it right. We seem not to mind too much if some piece of shit is slaughtering innocent men, women and children, so long as no imaginary lines are crossed. Historically, how upset do you suppose people were made when some other innocent people were killed in the village upstream, compared to when the rotting corpses were dumped in the river to pollute down stream? In the words of Sage Eddie, "Hitler killed people next door, oh, stupid man.”(1:58-2:30 min)

With your head out of your ass, when you go back to your job teaching history at UWM, full of pride and power from the UWMPUPC “big win,” remember, Rachel, you work for an institution that invests in the largest openly murderous criminal organization in the world, the Chinese Communist Party. And don’t embarrass yourself with finger waving at others, as this commits a reasoning fallacy that only exposes morals and values. And please don't insist, “No, no, Peking University is our collaborator, not the CCP.” Such a response could only further expose you. Rachel and the Revolution, faculty colleagues, administrators, politicians, the whole fucking lot of you are complicit in the greatest barbarism in the history of humanity. Your response is a breathtaking display of hypocrisy, ineptitude and ineffectiveness! Shame on you!

If you really want get something from reading this self-righteous rip, ask yourself, why do so many universities and colleges seek international student revenue? As the students and faculty pass each other in the halls, they know the answer, and that is a big part of the problem. Just as a primer on its extensive benefits, the model with which I respond cuts the total cost of publicly funded face-to-face HE by at least fifty percent. You want a revolution? PSA is your weapon: United States, Canada, Australia.

But never mind all that. Let’s take a look at the “big win” over UWM, a victory over what I am sure the local community refers to as, our university (not another's), making it our victory over our university, over our UWM…are you paying attention? I’m sure these folks aren’t imbeciles. With less cognitive dissonance, it is a win over the university that Rachel and the Revolution reject on principle and in practice, on a long and difficult journey to sustainably shape an institution they would prefer to work for and call our UWM - you know, similar to the line workers at Amazon, who call it their company and... Ha! Ha! Ya, right! It’s not your fucking university! It hasn’t been since at least the introduction of paid lectureships six centuries ago. And I’m not going to bother addressing the logical problems with the possessives, but its exploration is highly recommended as a way to expose deep-seated assumption about the HEI model.

Look, here is what that UWM talent, energy and commitment managed to wrestle from an institution that pimps out HE to international mass murdering regimes: 1) a highly contentious claim that is prima facia obviously false; 2) a claim that screams Duh! during times of urban warfare; and 3) a comparatively insignificant response to the absolute known pain in the world. These characterizations are open to debate, of course. But frankly, my interest is in the wasted talent and passion. I could really use the help with a proper reformation or revolution in HE. I mean, that is if you are being rational and sincere in the pursuit of diminished (global) suffering and a desire to change things at your university......from which eventually you will get fired or retired.

Right now, UWM collaborates with the Caveman and his CCP criminal enterprise! How's my inflammatory rhetoric? Calling the venerable, world leader for, what does he call it these days? Common prosperity? Oh, no, right. Reality has dawned and now the message is something like, it's good to suffer or get over yourself or some such incredible drivel, from a fucking communist! Xi Jinping (习近平), is a piece of shit, a caveman. Does my rhetoric sound like the irreverence on American campuses right now? My rhetoric regarding CCP China is not inflammatory, it is factual - and I have not made an error in wording this distinction. Now, if you don't like facts, then we are done talking.

Unlike yours, my rhetoric is fresh, not riddled with highly dubious claims, patently obvious ones, and it most certainly does not suffer from the impotency of yet another bitch and band-aid for the pains caused by the HEI model in this world. Unlike the encampments, the PSA model offers sustainable emancipation from dependence on the likes of Mao (毛泽东), DeSantis, Erdoğan, or Lowell.

Look, knock yourself out with your own cause, whatever that might be. But at least exercise basic reasoning skills and recognize the obvious fact that not all causes are created equal, if your aim is to minimize the amount of suffering in the world, as efficiently, expediently, effectively and ecologically as possible. The same is true if your aim is the rectification or rebirth of your precious university. In the end, you are academics and students. Try to be consistent and effective in setting and reaching sustainable goals. I wonder if this was included among the learning that was exchanged in the encampment? For that matter, did no one raise their hand as I am and say, “Um, China?”

The UWMPUPC encampment is an embarrassment as far as correction or mitigation of the massive, widespread misery that has been caused by universities and colleges across the continents for hundreds of years, but also a farce in terms of sincere effort meant to reduce global authoritarian-based suffering. I repeat, 100 million men, women, children and so long as one takes tutelage or tenure from UWM, one is complicit in unjust suffering and death. Sound familiar? At your next encampment, put that on a placard, a big one, for the zeros.

If I could meet Rachel face to face, I’d continue, “Like too many, you are not being a good academic in an additional regard: You fail to question your assumptions…surrounding the HEI model for HE. The PSA model was created thirty years ago, during my Masters degree. The tyranny of the HEI model was well-entrenched and it was clear that the tired parade of tirade and tape was not going to fix this cluster-fuck of a model. PSA was created by doing what academics are supposed to do: think outside the box. In this case, a box called the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Here's a highlighted look at what it's like outside the box,

...the open universities relied upon what is known as the Davie-definition of academic freedom. Dr Davie, former principal of the University of Cape Town, stated in a 1953-address to students that academic freedom of a university involves ‘four essential freedoms … to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught and who may be admitted to study’[...]. According to the authors of the 1957-statement, interference with these core freedoms constituted a breach of the institution's right to academic freedom. The attempt by the apartheid government to prescribe who may be admitted to a university on non-academic grounds was accordingly viewed as unjustifiable interference with academic freedom. In the absence of legally enforceable fundamental rights, the reliance placed on this freedom was unable to prevent the enforced segregation of people of 'different races' in universities.

Do you see the problem? Do you see the PSA solution? It's not perfect, but it's elegant.

Final Terms of En-Rampagement

When Rachel describes intellectual experience in the encampment, I imagine it similar to the encampment in which my wife, her family and the rest of the uncountable Chinese have lived and died under the CCP. She says of this two-week span that it was a “conversation I would want to have in a seminar that I have yet to teach.” Can you appreciate the tear-filled, bloody, bitter irony?

This is the seminar that you must teach: PSA vs HEI: The Final Smackdown. I tell you right now, if Rachel or anyone arranges such a seminar, I’ll do my best to attend, to raise my hand on every syllable. PSA is a viable, desirable, sustainable model for HE provision that stands a far better chance of realizing the universitas to which Rachel alludes,

The encampments are zones of collaboration, invention, and spontaneous performance. They are multiracial, interfaith, queer and trans-positive. New forms of knowledge emerge from them on the daily. They are the true universities.

I have read nothing from the historian except this piece, which is chosen for tactical reasons, one of which is to position PSA among the serious solutions to the serious and persistent interconnected problems in (global) HE, that throughout its history the HEI model has proven grossly inept at solving and is largely responsible for causing. I mean seriously, look at the absurdity of the holy HE trinity of tenure, academic freedom and shared governance - here is my first serious wade into that viney territory. This Academe Blog material illustrates reasoning that is making its way around the academy right now and not meant as a personal attack on Rachel. Well, sort of not meant that way. It’s not so much an attack as it is a plea to do better, with this pathetic soul as the messenger.

As a final shove under the bus, Rachel and the Revolution can assist with a couple more jabs at the so-called academic profession and its activism under the rule of the HEI model. This historian likens encampments on campuses across countries like the US, UK, Canada, and Australia to 1968 Paris. Fair play, I suppose. But take a step back. Appreciate that such flexing by students and academics would never be allowed on a Chinese campus, while the CCP actively obstructs and corrupts its exercise on campuses in each of these countries and in those institutions brazen enough to have campuses on CCP turf in China. As for the general populace, for the vast majority such thoughts would never even enter their minds. I mean this literally, the thought to organize and protest, to demand from their university, never mind their (or is it, the) CCP government, what is rightfully theirs by nature, by constitution, by law, such thoughts (never mind conversations) are tragically rare in the Republic of China, oh, sorry, I meant the People’s Republic of China - speaking of tear-filled, bloody, bitter irony.

This is why, though public protest or complaint, even directed at low to mid-level government officials, happens regularly in modern Communist China, there is seldom swell meant to effect broad social or institutional change. Protest is parochial in China. These days though, that swell is growing everywhere, but it not thanks to the efforts of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and when things swell in China, it is tearful, bloody and bitter for us all. But it’ll be ok, their system of governance is fueled by “process democracy,” the folks at UWM are working to making it a better place for all Chinese, and anyway thousands of years of Imperial rule have schooled that thinking about, thinking about protest is reserved only for the direst of circumstances (所谓拼的一身剐，敢把皇帝拉下马，重点是“一身剐”了，才有“拉皇帝下马”的想法). Are we there yet?

Shifting the bus into reverse, as an educator in history at an institution with a long history of, what is it, complicity in support of oppression and death, not the sexy genocide variety, but still the numbers are impressive, I ask you to remind yourself what was happening in Communist China during the year 1968, during one of the many years in which on average the CCP murders a million men, women and children. Now jump ahead by a decade and over another ten million murdered souls to find Shain Scholars – in a country where “scholasticide” is in a league of its own. As a participant in the shared governance of your employer, if you dare, fast forward several more decades to the ongoing shit show that is (global) HE under a model with HEIs like UWM, faculty like yourself, and organizations like the AAUP, and these are some of the good guys! Perhaps, but all the same, a crew of complicity in the service to a mass murdering crime lord. It is a matter of perspective, but I fear one not available to all.

Of course, this same analysis can be done using the Nazis, Governor Reagan,...but don’t take my word for it, look at Ellen Schrecker’s litany of failure and compromise or the notion of sub-authoritarianism discussed by Jennifer Ruth, or how about this gem below, also from an historian, Associate Professor Elizabeth Tandy Shermer at Loyola University Chicago, all three of whom saddle at the AAUP ranch. But in any case, please also look at my PSA-inspired response to such reasoning.

…Viewing the history of higher education through this prism reveals that activism was critical in the past and is vital for the future. Faculty and staff—not policy makers, academic administrators, or legislators—made the academy a better place in which to work and study, as did the adoption of professional standards like those outlined in the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Faculty and their affiliate groups organized for tenure as a form of job security that included power over decisions about hiring and promotion; in 1969, about 78 percent of faculty members had tenure or were eligible for it. Staff also organized, including University of California service and technical workers in the 1940s and Harvard clerical workers in the 1980s.

Students have also played a vital role in demanding justice on campus. They have included the graduate students who started the first teaching assistant union at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the early 1970s and the University of Virginia undergraduates who were part of a vibrant living-wage campaign for campus workers in the 1990s. Undergraduate and graduate students also spent decades at the forefront of the legal efforts to desegregate the academy, end the quota system, and deliver the equal opportunities guaranteed in one of the most famous amendments to the Higher Education Act, Title IX. Current students and alumni have also organized and harnessed the power of social media to demand tuition-free college and the cancellation of student debt, which has disproportionately burdened students of color, especially women, precisely because postwar policy makers left so much power over federal tuition assistance in the hands of campus financial-aid offices.

Such bravery, hard work, collaboration, and organizing could finally give the American academy the golden age it never had. Activists have accomplished a lot since the pandemic has revealed how many students, not to mention contingent faculty, struggle with debt and how many colleges and universities struggle with shaky finances. Their organizing pushed President Joe Biden to cancel some student debt and recognize that Black and brown students have been harmed the most by a program initially designed to ensure repayment to lenders, some of which now service the loans directly issued by the Department of Education. There is more work to do—as sociologist Charlie Eaton explains in an online article for this issue of Academe on the student loan–forgiveness movement—at the campus, local, state, and federal levels to ensure that higher education finally becomes a genuinely accessible public good, not a private luxury.

A gilded, not golden age – not my words. The state of affairs is worse than even Schermer manages to describe and considerably less rosy (or is it crimson?). The lengthy quote describes with pride and promise something that unwittingly exposes another sort of gild, one of intellect and imagination. The concepts and phrases with which the professional model takes serious issue and reinterprets, reinvents, or rejects are color-coded, with this post and the PSA blog as translation keys, and a parenthetic remark that much of the unmolested material in this quote is sad, though not from your point of view.

Yeah, me too. 

To the actual Rachel Ida Buff, I hope she can forgive me this perhaps bizarre, probably offensive, use of her public opinion. To all the academics she embodies, who feel they can save the soul of their institutional employer, save it from the grip of authoritarianism, and to the students who join them in seeing universities and colleges as their own (a slight of hand, not unlike telling people teaching is a calling), and especially to all those who feel there has been a ground shift in access, quality, freedom, responsibility, integrity, democracy, solidarity, and the rest of the package with respect to HEIs or HE: 

Hey crew, thanks, but get your heads out of your asses!

In 1968 and 1969 Communist China, there was no tenure, as there is none today, at least not something we could recognize or with which we could draw inspiration. You know what else there was none of during this time, universities and colleges.

 📣 📣 📣 📣

Cheerleading can be a good thing, but let's not do it at the high school level. There is too much at stake for everyone. I had fun writing this. Not my usual groove. As always, for over a decade on this blog, I welcome all interaction.