politics and academia

While there is much debate from within the academic institution on global American politics, and support for political intellectuals such as Cornell West, Stanley Fish, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, David Harvey, there seems to be little attention paid to the changing politics of the academic institution itself, as though it were immune to the growing attacks on the democratic process. Being students today is a radically different experience, one that in many ways replicates the deeply troubling mechanisms of censorship we see all over America. Many of these students, from undergraduate to the graduate level, have internalized the political climate into their academic thinking, becoming self-censoring in order to advance their careers. This unquestioning acceptance of career advancement has turned the university into an business-oriented institution, seriously undermining the university as a place for critical thought. Of course there are still the great critical and progressive thinkers, but given the course of the past few years, we might be tempted to think that they are the last of a kind of political intellectual that resists and thinks the givens of political mandates. It is time to reclaim their resistance and the university as a space of intellectual protest, especially in a time of unprecedented erosion of democratic values.

Undisciplinarity is a provocation and a resistance, a way to rethink the categories we live by and propose a new space of free critical thought, one that need not take into account disciplinary boundaries. Undisciplinarity is a way to think and to act, to disobey the pervasive mandates of fear and suspicion in the university in order to make it a place of freedom in a global world of terror.