The Real Threat to Academic Freedom...

[Traitorfish]

You wouldn't happen to be a junior academic, now would you?

No, more or less for the reasons given above. (My career choices are a special disaster of my own making and to do not fit any broader schema.)

A better word for this would probably be "precarization" - the precarization of academic work since technically academics who don't become part of management are already proletarians.

I think both are applicable. Until the late twentieth century, we can haggle over the exact date, academia was a sort of isolated remnant of the guild system: universities were understood as essentially corporate bodies comprised of academics, with non-tenured academics occupying journeyman and apprentice rolls. While the junior academics weren't always treated particularly well, there was a shared stake in the institutions that no longer exists for any but the most senior academics. The process of precarisation, while real, requires the prior shift from a guild-system to a wage-system, from universities existing for the sake of the academics and students which comprise the university, to universities existing as a machine which turns money into more money.

If the right weren't so profoundly captialism-illiterate, they'd be toasting their victory.

 

[Mouthwash]

What he said about the West Bank settlers was out of line but not grounds to revoke his position.

He did call for the deaths of nearly 400,000 Israelis. Even if not serious, that's still a horrific statement. What if it were a Jewish applicant calling for an equal number of Palestinian deaths?

His comments about antisemitism are clearly in reference to the right-wing Zionist attempts to redefine antisemitism into opposition to any Israeli policy, but I can easily see how his words could be misunderstood there if taken out of context.

How do you claim that? Looks like it could be either one to me. And again, how do you think people would respond if he had been talking about BLM and 'racism?'

Finally, is academic work is garbage and he shouldn't have been offered any position to begin with.

To paraphrase my Historical Methods Professor:

As an academic, a successful career is publishing a text which is read and subsequently cited by the six other academics in the field for 5-10 years, after which point the book goes on a shelf in the university library and is never touched or read again.

Not doing a great job selling it here.

 

[Lexicus]

He did call for the deaths of nearly 400,000 Israelis. Even if not serious, that's still a horrific statement. What if it were a Jewish applicant calling for an equal number of Palestinian deaths?

No one is in a position to kill 400,000 Israelis. The Israelis are in a position to kill that many Palestinians, if they wanted.

And again, how do you think people would respond if he had been talking about BLM and 'racism?'

People make such claims about BLM and racism all the time.

 

[Mouthwash]

No one is in a position to kill 400,000 Israelis. The Israelis are in a position to kill that many Palestinians, if they wanted.

No one is talking the possibility. We're talking about the person's opinion. There are no gas chambers anymore, but Holocaust denial is still taboo for a reason.

People make such claims about BLM and racism all the time.

Academics? Professors?

 

[Lexicus]

Academics? Professors?

I don't know of any examples of that but I would be very surprised if there were none.

 

[metalhead]

I think both are applicable. Until the late twentieth century, we can haggle over the exact date, academia was a sort of isolated remnant of the guild system: universities were understood as essentially corporate bodies comprised of academics, with non-tenured academics occupying journeyman and apprentice rolls. While the junior academics weren't always treated particularly well, there was a shared stake in the institutions that no longer exists for any but the most senior academics. The process of precarisation, while real, requires the prior shift from a guild-system to a wage-system, from universities existing for the sake of the academics and students which comprise the university, to universities existing as a machine which turns money into more money.

Is this happening in other places than (the United States of) America?

 

[dutchfire]

Yes, but less.