Jamie Kirchick recently posted a rather moronic and semi-paranoid attack on the UOC/pro-levin panegyric in anticipation of a reaction to the fact that Slick Rick The Ruler is in the top ten highest paid university presidents he assumes UOCistas would be predisposed towards. Ironically, the first person to critique Kirchick's piece is the same person who called me a "detatched lunatic" last spring, which probably says something about just how reactionary Kirchick's apologia for plutocracy is. Well, either that, or I'm a detatched lunatic, which is also a distinct possibility given my current mental state.



Evan's critique of Kirchick's argument about Levin's salary is dead on. What Kirchick understands as "the elementary rules of economics" arguably have even less of a role in determining Levin's salary than they do the schema in which workers at Yale make per year working what Levin will take home in a month -- after he retires. (Thank you, Juan Gonzalez.) This isn't about invisible hands, save in the sense that pay inequity is something equally reified and artificial - it's about power, and it's about class, and it's about how the postwar/post Bayh-Dole academy as corporate agent of knowledge production/consolidation/privatization articulates value and "legitimacy." (See Gary Haller's comment to a worker wondering why a worker panel in the JE Dining Hall in Spring 2002 wasn't a master's tea in which Haller responded that masters' teas were aimed at showcasing valid career paths for Yale undergraduates.)



Since no current UOCistas have answered Kirchick's second thesis, which is pure provocatory vitriol and empty wish-fulfilment, (psychoanalysis, here i come -- move over Fred Jameson!) I'll not be the sole respondent to what strikes me as a rather pitiful cry for attention. Though i doubt Kirchick could tell a "neo-Marxist" from a flying squirrel, and his argument that the UOC constitutes solely rich, white suburbanites (news to me, and i was there pretty much from the beginning through last May) is, given Kirchick's own reactionary take on race and class as evinced in so many classic YDN columns (those poor trembling workers beset by their cruel union to turn against their kind master) highly suspect. Kirchick, whose entire weltanschaaung (thank you Ms. Livingston,) is based on his own privileging of whiteness and empire attempts to slander a diverse coalition of student organizers by erasing that which he cannot understand. The failure of that conservative shibboleth that is western reason leads him to turn to a thoroughly postmodern right wing identity politics, an empire of thought thoroughly divorced from the smoldering husk of the 'reality-based community'. In doing so, Jamie admits defeat, however silently. I feel kind of sorry for him.



I probably shouldn't have posted anything on this subject. I'd like to think I tried to take the high road.