here we go again

I got myself into this one, i know.

I like it here at Yale, where I can treat school as my own personal political playground and never pay any serious consequences! Yale has all the ingredients. An oppressed working class and an evil, capitalist stooge aristocracy running the show. Boy! Down with the capitalist robber barons and their imperialist-racialist-genderist-heterosexualist conceptions of society!

I could point out that Jamie treats political conventions at which psychotic fascists espouse homophobic constructions of citizenship and celebrate imperial warfare while hurling metaphoric spitballs at the men and women who actually get roped into waging it as his own playground, for while I (gasp) share his conviction that such events are “political theater,” I ascribe a great deal of significance to the ways in which such pageants construct and define nation, progress, and enemy, whereas Jamie seems more interested in following Jesse Jackson around and hobnobbing with famous people. Kirchick’s ridicule, directed at the notion that campus activism has any validity, and envisioning Yale as political playground (and I think the neo-(and paleo-)conservatives have always been more guilty of this than activists and organizers affiliated with the global justice movement) suggests his own parochial understanding of the political and cultural economy of higher education and the impact which an 11 billion dollar corporation makes upon global capital. The student labor movements, like other nodes of the networks which constitute the global justice movements, have always understood not only the privilege we enjoy as students at universities which must at least, unlike the secret service, pay lip service to freedom of speech, open debate, and academic freedom, but how we can target universities as nodes of capital and spaces at which it is both produced and reproduced, linking campus struggles with those affecting the communities around them, and, as in Yale’s case, the consequences of yale’s 3.5 billion dollar investement in an 8 billion dollar hedge fund in the business of employing IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs to hijack economies from Indonesia to Argentina to southern Colorado. No one has ever made the argument that student organizing should be solely focused on campus, nor have any of us limited ourselves to such a focus in practice. It should come as little surprise that Kirchick does the social movement many of us have spent years working with in New Haven a disservice by consigning it to the playground. Try telling that to Scott Marks, Velma Williams, Andrea Cole, or Dale Lucas. The scorn which people like Jamie focus on the movements organized by the folks who clean their bathrooms, cook their food, care for them when they’ve consumed too much sherry or chardonnay, or teach their sections and grade their papers constitutes the real manifestation of privilege and exclusion here, and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it anymore.

Right, because things like "Sexuality and Gender conceptions of the 16th Century Native American" are really adding to our body of knowledge.

Guess that depends on how you define "our."