Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University

Let me start by mapping out my relationship with Virginia Tech.  My brother went to Virginia Tech.  My sister went to Virginia Tech.  My father went to Virginia Tech.  My father’s brother went to Virginia Tech.  My two brothers-in-law went to Virginia Tech.  My sister-in-law went to Virginia Tech.  Much of my high school class went to Virginia Tech. 

I grew up an hour west of here, in a border town called Bluefield, and spent what must have been a hundred weekend days in Blacksburg. 

And I taught for nine years at Virginia Tech. 

My relationship with the university ended poorly.  I came to Virginia Tech as an assistant professor in 2006.  Three years later I earned tenure.  In 2013, I accepted another job at the University of Illinois with no effort on Virginia Tech’s part to retain me.  A few days before reporting in the fall of 2014, I was fired from Illinois, tenure and all, leaving me in a damnable no-man’s-land.  Nevertheless, a return to Virginia Tech was out of the question.  I had already resigned.  Besides, nobody at the school offered it as a possibility. 

Why did the relationship end poorly?  I hope you’ll forgive my bias, but it wasn’t because I had done anything wrong.  I had an excellent research profile—much stronger, if I can be allowed a bit of self-congratulation, than my college and department colleagues.  I was a popular teacher.  I never fielded a student complaint.  My mere presence boosted the university’s interminable (and ineffectual) diversity efforts.  And I certainly upheld the Principles of Community so proudly touted around these parts as some kind of ethical cure-all. 

(More on those later.) 

What got me in trouble was an essay.  To be more specific, an essay questioning the wisdom of compulsive patriotism.  An essay, in other words, asking readers to think critically about grandiloquent narratives of self and society—precisely the sort of thing a humanities professor is supposed to do. 

An essay that all in all is rather conservative in its outlook, not to mention its assumptions, and one whose conclusions I no longer fully agree with. 

The essay was published in Salon-dot-com on a Sunday.  I’ll always remember it was a Sunday because we usually treated ourselves to pizza on Sunday and I was too nervous to eat.  A few hours after the essay posted, it was burning through the internet.  By Monday, various people on campus were calling for me to be fired.  My aggression against the poor beleaguered military had made national news.  Fox News cranked up its usual bluster.  Every bootlicker with an internet connection was shocked and offended.  The White House issued a condemnation. 

The dean of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at the time assured me that I wouldn’t be fired, but that didn’t mean I’d be free of punishment, which takes many forms in academe.  Ostracism is the old standard that Virginia Tech would use.  Three or four colleagues offered support.  For everyone else, I simply ceased to exist.  It’s a horrible thing to be abandoned in a moment of tremendous need.  That the abandonment is predicated on self-preservation makes it even worse. 

Let me talk for a second about ostracism in academe.  It is used as a method of coercion and also as a punishment for defiance.  (Nearly all norms in academe function to effect conformity.)  We don’t spend much time discussing ostracism, mostly because ostracism serves power and serving power is baked into the industry’s DNA.  But discussing ostracism also contravenes deeply-embedded notions of professional etiquette. 

So let’s discuss it even if we’re not supposed to—because we’re not supposed to. 

Getting ostracized hurts.  Goddamn does it hurt.  It hurts with a special intensity if you come from a community of undesirables and already have a lifetime of rejection to sort. 

Being Palestinian in academe, for example, means that asserting the simple fact of your existence leads to all kinds of hostility—never mind actually making basic demands for respect and equality that come with the assertion.  It’s a stunning form of repression, insidious and systematic, almost incomprehensible but for the fact that it keeps happening in full view of the world despite an equally insidious and systematic unwillingness to acknowledge the problem.  The same holds, in different ways, for Black and Indigenous people and various other groups seen as expendable in the intellectual marketplace. 

Palestinians face punishment at an extraordinary rate in academe, from undergrads to tenured professors.  It’s the open secret of today’s debates about free speech and cancel culture.  Those debates largely fail because they refuse to account for the most conspicuous instances of political repression today.  Within academe, Zionist recrimination is still a niche issue or, worse, a topic of disrepute.  That’s why it’s so brutally effective:  you get punished merely for recognizing the punishment. 

Let’s take a broader view of the situation.  We understand that racism necessarily involves disparities of power, that it’s not simply a matter of individual preference and prejudice, so why are we allowing Zionists to dictate what Palestinians can and cannot say?  Palestinians have virtually no power on campus (or off, for that matter).  Moreover, it is Israel, not the Palestinians, with a nuclear arsenal, an unequal judicial system, and unconditional backing from the United States.  Yet conservatives and liberals alike have decided that merely asserting a Palestinian identity is grounds for discipline.  Here is an example of how voracious racism can be without a countervailing force. 

The old adage, which I’ve always found horrible, informs us that children should be seen and not heard.  We haven’t even achieved the status of childishness, that familiar colonial category for natives, because our mandate is to be both unseen and unheard.  So what’s left?  Complete inhumanity. 

This is a type of ostracism that doesn’t arise from bad behavior, or what’s perceived to be bad behavior.  It’s an intrinsic feature of campus life and plays a significant role in graduate admissions, hiring, tenure, promotion, publishing, awards, mobility, networking, grant-writing, pedagogy, campus climate, and academic freedom.  Many of you don’t have to do anything to earn ostracism.  You earned it the moment you stepped onto campus, by biology alone.  Ostracism is built into the professorial economy.  If peer-review doesn’t maintain order, then upper administrators and politicians are happy to do the job. 

I said a moment ago that a humanities professor is supposed to think critically.  I was being a bit coy.  It’s not actually what a humanities professor is supposed to do.  In the corporate university, critical thinking is more a brand than an avocation.  Applying sharp criticism to structures of power is okay if they exist in another country, especially an official enemy, or to a bygone era of U.S. history.  But to apply it in the present, against one’s own government, against one’s own campus, even?  That’s not critical thinking; it’s barbarity. 

So we have to examine critical thinking as a signifier, dynamic and ambiguous.  It has a normative definition, a tacit definition, and an ideal definition.  One of the hallmarks of graduate training is learning to comprehend those definitions and applying the correct one as needed for professional success. 

*****

I have a lot to say about Virginia Tech, but I want to spare you the ennui of listening to me complain—well, complaining about my individual predicament, anyway.  I have plenty of complaints about the state of academe. 

My history with Virginia Tech, however, does illustrate various problems within the industry.  Anything I say about Virginia Tech more or less applies to U.S. academe in general. 

During the backlash to my essay, I was condemned and threatened specifically as an Arab, as a foreigner (even though I was born in West Virginia), and as a Muslim (even though I’m Christian).  My ethnicity, perceived or real, was central to the backlash.  I don’t claim that being white would have mitigated the public’s fury, but it strikes me as important that a distinctly racialized reaction emerged, as if organically (it wasn’t, of course, organic).  Hammering on my brownness was the immediate response, which enlivened the premise of the essay that dehumanization is inherent to U.S. militarism.  Virginia Tech offered no recognition of this monstrous, explicit racism directed at one of its employees.  To the contrary, the university’s spokesperson encouraged the mob’s hatred.  This too is a reality you’ll face on campus:  “diversity” is attached to institutional accumulation and in this condition it becomes a mechanism to discipline the recusant.  Better a plagiarist or a sexual predator than a principled anti-imperialist. 

By the way, my old department, English, had a Nazi teaching composition a few years ago—not a grammar Nazi, either; a bona fide blood-and-soil Nazi.  Did the university condemn his politics?  Make clear that it doesn’t share his values?  Encourage the community to ostracize him?  Of course not.  The university defended his right to free speech. 

This wasn’t because of inconsistency or individual lapses of judgment.  Humoring Nazis and sex pests while chastising ethnic and ideological undesirables is concordant to the actual mission of the corporate university.  In the end it has no choice but to accommodate reactionaries because they’re reliable soldiers of the corporate university’s class interests.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking that the administrative class will defend your subversive ideas on principle.  The calculus at play mixes dogma with convenience.  Civil liberties come and go depending on their utility. 

When administrators claim to value critical thinking, they’re lying to you.  Well, maybe they’re not lying, per se, but they sure as hell aren’t being honest.  There’s a difference between critical thinking as an unbounded practice, capable of disrupting orthodoxy, and critical thinking as a rhetorical commodity. 

The normative definition of critical thinking doesn’t prioritize either criticism or thought.  It is hopelessly intertwined with professional rewards and public relations.  There are conditions attached to critical thinking as envisioned by administrators (and no small number of professors).  Optimally, critical thinking is supposed to be incompatible with institutional norms.  Critical thinking isn’t supposed to suffer ideological constraints.  But in the corporate university, critical thinking cannot supersede its own corporatization.  This form of critical thinking has unstated but distinct boundaries.  We’re all aware of them, if only implicitly.  That’s how you know they’re real:  nobody discusses them and yet everybody enforces their limitations.  Traverse those boundaries and critical thinking gets redefined as sedition, as infantilism, as incivility. 

*****

A few moments ago, I mentioned Tech’s Principles of Community.  Let’s focus on them for a second as an example of typical PR messaging.  On its own, PR messaging isn’t objectionable.  We recognize that modern universities need to bang on about their superior campus climates, if only to compete for top students and faculty. 

The problem isn’t that the messaging fails to live up to its promise.  It’s that the messengers uphold principles in stark contrast to the messaging.  If you go to any random university website and peruse its version of the Principles, the first thing you should notice is that the covenant is inclusive to the point of being useless.  There’s usually mention of racism and sexism and so forth, but placed in equal standing to things like ideological diversity and respect for military personnel.  It’s the All Lives Matter approach to public relations.  These principles work selectively, of course, according to an action’s disadvantage or benefit to power.  By taking no particular stand—that is, by treating campus as neutral political terrain—they ensure preservation of the status quo. 

In this sense, they generally parallel the limits of academic freedom.  I’m not speaking of academic freedom as an idea or a legal protection.  I’m concerned with how it actually performs amid a set of material realities.  Those material realities most notably include sexual violence, structural racism, increased precarity, legislative hostility, exorbitant tuition, obscene student debt, and an ever-growing administrative class. 

We cannot understand academic freedom without also understanding the contexts of access and enforcement in which it operates.  In other words, academic freedom isn’t a universal right.  And not just because of uneven implementation, either.  Some workers on campus simply have no academic freedom, no matter how badly apologists for managerial venality want to dissemble about technicalities.  What academic freedom do graduate students enjoy?  Student-activists?  Adjuncts?  They enjoy the principle of academic freedom (maybe), but in reality they can be punished for stepping out of line without much recourse.  It’s one reason why the higher-ups fill classrooms with contingent instructors.  Sure, economics play a significant role, but management likes the idea of a workforce that can be terminated at will.  Somebody pisses you off?  Somebody annoys the donors?  Somebody runs afoul of the local business community?  You don’t have to fire them for being uncivil and then worry about a lawsuit.  Just decline to renew the contract.  “Sorry, pal, enrollments are down this year; we’re gonna have to let you go.”  And this is to say nothing about other essential campus workers who don’t even enjoy the principle of academic freedom, such as maintenance and kitchen staff, bus drivers, landscapers, and so forth. 

We should also bear in mind that academic freedom isn’t static or immutable.  Its provisions are deeply contested and flexible according to local circumstance.  Moreover, if it’s to have any enforcement mechanism, academic freedom relies on institutions constitutionally hostile to the dispossessed.  Academic freedom doesn’t supply the answer to problems of racism and sexual violence.  At its best, it protects workers from sanction, but it cannot intervene into actual sites of material struggle. 

Academic freedom is largely contingent on tenure (and even then it’s not guaranteed).  With the erosion of tenure, academic freedom becomes a limited commodity.  As its limits increase, so it increases in value.  Thus tenure becomes a ready-made enticement to good behavior.  Management has effectively conscripted the beneficiaries of academic freedom into facilitating its erosion.  Like any other precious resource, academic freedom grows in demand as industry leaders restrict its distribution.  It’s quickly becoming a luxury item.  A misanthropic observer might come to the conclusion that tenure is a fantastic inducement to conformity.  

I’m not arguing against the importance of academic freedom.  I believe it to be a crucial aspect of higher education, along with tenure.  I’m asking you simply to recognize its limitations, to examine its presence in relation to systems of power.  Doing so provides impetus to rethink the conditions in which we study and work, and perhaps to reimagine the prospects of higher education altogether.  There’s a reason that the gentrified classes on campus dismiss such endeavors as unsophisticated.  If we try to ensure that everyone on campus can enjoy adequate protections and a healthy workplace environment, then we’ll necessarily be participating in a great act of subversion. 

*****

Let’s take a second and explore how time is structured in the modern corporate university.  You probably spend a lot of time thinking about how you spend your time.  The habit ties into notions of productivity and accomplishment.  What must I do to earn a good grade?  What will make me an attractive job candidate?  What are the criteria for tenure and promotion?  What is required of me to be a good campus citizen? 

Note that you have no say in these matters.  They are dicta handed down from above and can change without warning.  The supposedly democratic system is in fact hierarchical.  But we can leave that aside.  Even democracy wouldn’t alleviate the problem I have in mind. 

When we talk about the structure of time in academe, it’s really an issue of labor rights, which the tenured professoriate, with some exceptions, is loath to discuss.  Much of the job of an assistant professor or an adjunct consists of paperwork and metrics and surveys and bean-counting and a whole bunch of other bureaucratic rigmarole.  We spend our time, in other words, getting inculcated into institutional culture.  When people complain about the difficulties of academe, they’re generally not talking about teaching and writing.  They usually have in mind bad colleagues, abusive relationships, absurd service obligations, endless assessment rituals, and inscrutable administrators.  That is to say, the difficulties exist in the very institutional culture so aggressively touted as civilized and urbane.  Something needs to change.  Nearly everything needs to change. 

“Hold on,” you may be saying, “is this guy opposing objective standards of assessment?” 

The answer is, yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. 

This stuff about commodification and alienation has been discussed at great length, predating Marx, but we have to keep asking what it looks like in our current material circumstances.  How are certain forces organized to effect fealty among people supposedly obliged to irreverence or even blasphemy?  Where can we find meaning if sites of inquiry are governed by a practical need to placate and mollify? 

Simply stated, in the current configuration of the corporate university, much of our labor is devoted to surviving mendacity.  You can always leave academe, of course, but that seems a lot to ask of people who got into the business because it promised a better ethical standard than the corporate world. 

I prefer a more straightforward solution:  defy, struggle, misbehave.  To do that, we should first reassess and challenge vocabularies we might otherwise take for granted. 

Let’s start with “success.”  What does it mean in this profession?  Landing a tenure-track gig.  Achieving tenure.  Becoming a full professor.  Publications.  International recognition.  Keynote speeches.  Okay, but by which means can we viably succeed if the entire notion is predicated on the uncommon, the exceptional? 

Can one be considered a success in less traditional, perhaps less prestigious ways?  Certainly.  But not if it requires the consent of thought-leaders and opinion-makers, for whom the current system works just fine.  So the task of redefinition falls to us.  That means we agitate against normative ideas of success and many other professional standards, which expertly do so little to justify their survival.  We have to quit reproducing the harmful commonplaces of an industry given to injury and abuse.  Going along with the normal state of affairs—genuflecting to the brand, to the fancy degree, to the star scholar—might not make you complicit in the injury and abuse, but it doesn’t do much to change them.  Why do senior scholars wield so much power over their grad students?  Because their recommendation can sink or save a student’s career.  Well, why do we need to heed the authority of senior scholars?  Who says we have to trust their opinions?  Why cede so much power over hiring decisions to an outsider?  Maybe it would be better to banish letters of recommendation altogether. 

I sat on or observed plenty of search committees in my day.  I promise you that a committee has everything it needs to make an informed hire simply by reading a candidate’s work and interviewing the candidate.  The letters are essentially an exercise in deference.  If you can’t know what you need to know about a person by reading their writing then you don’t need to be deciding whom to put in a classroom. 

Instead of reproducing the slavish customs of awe and deferral, let’s commit to recalcitrance.  Let’s nurture our own visions of success.  It is in the imagination, after all, that material realities first come into existence.  We’re trained to conceptualize rewards as salary and status, right?  Professorships, affiliations, access, awards, things of that nature.  But let me propose that rewards aren’t merely objects, that they’re psychological instruments, as well.  Few things are more rewarding than doing right by members of your community.  Few things are more rewarding than trust and companionship.  Few things are more rewarding than company among the dispossessed and downtrodden.  Few things, for that matter, are more rewarding than staring down your oppressor. 

This industry structures our relationships to be antagonistic.  We’re forced to compete for increasingly meager resources.  Social capital isn’t something you can just pick up by going to class.  It’s something you pursue at the expense of others.  There is no abundance—the credentials that signify prestige are limited commodities.  You’re an individual brand marketing yourself to centers of power.  Access is important.  It doesn’t come without the right gestures.  Pedigree is crucial.  You don’t get it without a rigorous audition. 

You see, this emphasis on upward mobility—this insistence that higher-ups constantly need to be appeased—is inherently demeaning.  You have to suppress passion.  You have to sell yourself.  What is “networking” at base other than salesmanship?  You have to be inoffensive.  But whom are we supposed to not offend?  Administrative assistants?  Janitors?  Of course not.  We can be horrible to them.  We can’t offend the nabobs who are already dominant. 

A final word about recalcitrance, as it’s been my favorite concept for many years.  It’s a pretty simple thing:  don’t act in service to the dominant culture of academe or politics or media or whatever to the degree that you have any autonomy.  If you know something is harmful, then withhold your participation—or at the very least don’t facilitate the harm.  If you know somebody to be toxic or abusive, then you needn’t defer to their recommendations.  Oh, you’re a famous philosopher in a top-ten department?  That’s nice.  You’re also a strikebreaker.  Wow, you’re a New York Times bestseller?  Whatever.  You’re also a serial predator. 

We’re trained in a million subtle (and a few explicit) ways to let prestige override the strikebreaking and predation.  It needn’t be that way.  I get that you have to survive and that senior faculty and administrators play a great role in your survival.  In the end we’re dealing with systemic problems that can’t be ascribed to the individual.  But you can act on the little things in your control.  Decency is so often an impediment to professional success not because humans are inherently corrupt, but because centers of power are deeply invested in cynicism and conformity.  Refusing to become cynical can be a great act of resistance.  And refusing to conform doesn’t isolate you; it puts you in community with an entire world of gifted intellectuals.  If you’re of a particular disposition, one that values independence of spirit, then subversion presupposes survival.  Even in your loneliest moments, you may find that you already belong to lively fugitive geographies within and beyond the moribund norms of the corporate university. 

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it’s okay to be on the periphery.  Embrace the condition.  Build your career from the outside-in.  Instead of mourning what you imagine to be missing out on, pay attention to the wonderful opportunities for inquiry and connection that exist among the castaways.  It’s where you’ll find all the interesting people. 

It’s also where you’ll find meaningful work.  Not mechanical line-items for the CV, but the kind of labor that can make life on campus better, professionally and emotionally:  organizing a union, pushing for a living wage, seeking accountability for sexual predators, agitating to divest from imperialism.  Basically:  action trained on collective power or on mitigating the damage of metropolitan institutions on the Global South.  I’ve heard a bit about those efforts here at Virginia Tech and find them to be inspiring.  Without direct action, life is a whole lot of malaise.  And surely those of you who participate in direct action have discovered that it’s capable of producing a sense of community the university promises but simply cannot deliver. 

That’s the thing:  we can’t do it alone, but we don’t have to.  In our recalcitrance we give life to the imagination.  Only there can we find the desiccated ideals of higher education, listless and frazzled, waiting for us to put them back together. 

*****

I reckon you’ve indulged me long enough, so it hardly seems fair to end on a few personal notes, but again I request your graciousness. 

I’m always a bit self-conscious when speaking to an audience, especially one composed of academics.  It’s not that I suffer imposter syndrome or whatever you want to call it, although that certainly plays a role.  I suppose I’m uneasy with the way that academe trains us to think.  We read to find problems, to discredit, to be the smartest person in the room.  Sure, in many cases criticism has plenty of cause to be ruthless, but ruthlessness has a way of overwhelming the human dimensions of critique—those ideals and ideas that inspire a sense of worldliness, a sense of obligation to the non-scholars of the world.  How easy is it to forget that we’re here to serve students and the communities we purport to represent, not the egomaniacal needs of our superiors?  This ease of forgetfulness isn’t accidental.  It’s a ready-made culture that we walk into, diplomas in hand. 

We’re educated to complexify everything, but I’m rather tired of that formula.  Some things need to be simplified.  For example, Zionism is inhuman.  Anti-Black racism is ubiquitous.  Capitalism is leading us to ecocide.  U.S. imperialism never serves the common good.  These facts need no nuance.  Sometimes “fuck that” or “fuck them” is all the theoretical analysis you need. 

And yet all the highfalutin sensibilities about “complicating this” and “nuancing that” go out the window when a radical colleague needs to be disciplined.  I’d like to say I’ve grown accustomed to being dismissed as crude, uncouth, polemical, vulgar, and so forth, but I remain sensitive to those epithets.  They’re not disinterested observations.  They have a material impact.  They cost me a livelihood, for starters, and ensure that no U.S. institution will intercede on my behalf.  When I was fired from the University of Illinois—unjustly, according to every legal body of note—not a single college or university president decried the obvious abrogation of my academic freedom or the far-reaching harm to the field of Indigenous Studies.  Not a single college or university said, “This man was wronged and we owe it to the profession to get him a job.”  Not a single one.  Hundreds of them had plenty to say about the sanctity of academic freedom a year earlier when the American Studies Association passed a BDS resolution.  The brave graduate students here at Virginia Tech who recently affirmed BDS are familiar with the routine. 

When I pissed off the military claque at Virginia Tech, not a single tenured person in my department spoke up on my behalf.  They let me face the racism and the death threats on my own.  I didn’t get a single email saying “sorry this is happening to you,” much less an expression of solidarity.  Yeah, they were scared.  I understand that.  Fear isn’t a good excuse, though.  It means that my colleagues should have understood the importance of empathizing with my situation.  Beyond an overly-refined survival instinct, their silence was also a tacit acknowledgment that we’re governed by spiteful and unforgiving forces.  There’s your connection between ostracism and conformity.  That’s what I mean when I say the ideals into which we’re inculcated only hold in geographies of deference.  When things get serious, critical thinking and antagonistic inquiry are quickly exposed as a whole lot of hot air.  The Principles of Community turn out to be just another limited commodity.  And so what do we end up with?  A sharp depletion of academic freedom.  Academic freedom, after all, is unnecessary if the workers police themselves. 

In the end, I got tired of always being in trouble even though I’d never mistreated anyone in my life as a professor, even though I was only doing what was supposed to be my job.  (I can tell you that the job is infinitely easier without an academy to worry about.)  I went on to become a bus driver and now I’m preparing for whatever comes next. 

I go forth with enthusiasm because things in academe don’t have to be this way.  They don’t have to be this way.  We don’t have to concede to what management considers inevitable.  And that’s exactly what the grad student and young scholar must constantly repeat:  things don’t have to be this way; I’ll control what I can control, which is my recalcitrance, my commitment to empathy, and if it leads me away from this corpse of a profession then so be it. 

But for those who proceed and those who remain, think carefully about what kind of scholar and critic you want to be.  Not what convention says you’re supposed to be, but what you desire to become based on a lifetime of experience.  It took me many years to come up with a methodology suitable to my sense of usefulness in the world and still I haven’t fully sorted it. 

When you’ve been ostracized, you begin to think of criticism not as an exercise in humiliation or one-upmanship.  You become much more concerned about the possibilities of criticism as a form of compassion.  Bear in mind that compassion doesn’t necessarily mean politeness or timidity.  Sometimes it means getting angry on behalf of the dispossessed. 

It can be as simple as rejecting normative versions of critical thinking, those that gratify centers of power through opacity or complaisance.  Or it can take a more active form:  devotion to the well-being of the destitute, the persecuted, the unseen.  Compassion isn’t a disembodied emotion.  It’s fundamentally connected to justice.  It means refusing to abandon those in need of solidarity for the sake of reputation or career. 

Done right, compassion requires a bit of incivility. 

I remember when I was at the American University of Beirut [AUB] as the Edward Said Chair of American Studies.  I’d been hired a year after the Illinois fiasco and things were well.  The American Studies program advertised searches for a new chair and an assistant professor.  I applied for the chair position and was selected by the search committee and approved by the dean.  A candidate for assistant professor was identified and offered.  I prepared my family for a least a few more years in Beirut. 

As we were closing the deal, the university president intervened and shut down both appointments.  In my case he was acting on behest of at least two U.S. senators and quite likely the embassy, which has long put its fingers in AUB’s business.  I was kept on for one more lame-duck year. 

Administrators installed a white American woman as chair, without any kind of search or consultation with faculty.  The new chair hadn’t accomplished…anything, really.  I was upset.  It sucks when some minion gets a job for which you’re qualified and it does no use to pretend otherwise.  I’m not classy like that.  I have no grace for quislings and bootlickers.  I’m wary of highly credentialed people, too.  I may not necessarily hate them, but I certainly don’t trust them—and not because I’m some hirsute barbarian with primitive emotional processing, but because I’m actually well-versed in modernity.  I understand the properties of class.  I understand what compels highly credentialed people to protect their economic interests.  And I understand that only rarely do the highly credentialed break character. 

Anyway, back to the AUB situation.  We were a department of two.  Literally two.  The new chair who came out of nowhere with zero training or experience in American Studies, and me.  The chair was essentially a scab.  The situation was already awkward enough when I got word that she had referred to me as feral. 

I was pretty stunned, and none too pleased, as you might imagine.  I knew she didn’t mean it in a nasty way, exactly, but nastiness was certainly inscribed in the diction.  Here’s a white American, earning an exorbitant salary in an economically troubled Middle Eastern country, making extremely dubious comments about an Arab man she had helped screw out of a job.  This, by the way, is exactly the kind of insane situation that faculty of color deal with in modern academe.  In case you’re wondering about our legendary anger. 

For a long time, I was upset.  I left Beirut in a state of disgrace, just as I had left Blacksburg three years earlier, and returned to the United States still feeling upset.  In time, though, something began to change.  I started considering what it means to be feral in such a cultured environment.  It didn’t seem like a bad idea. 

The chair hadn’t used the term as a compliment, but I came to view it as one.  For in important ways I am feral.  Refusing demands to be civil might not be an expression of ferality, but it codes as one among the cultured.  A feral creature hasn’t been made captive or has reverted to wildness from a state of domestication.  Leaving academe, as more and more people are doing, sort of fits the paradigm of escaping captivity.  Rattling cages fits the paradigm, as well. 

Being feral of course has negative connotations for people whose bodies, by flesh or ability, are marked as savage.  But we remain feral even after having been seemingly accepted.  Those in control of the categories aren’t convinced of our presence in these grand institutions; they wait for our reversion to incivility.  Not even the most earnest capitalist can process surplus into modernity. 

Think of ferality as that part of yourself untamed by convention, more as a philosophical than physical state of being.  Feral in the sense of being fierce, incorruptible, defiant, uncivil.  Not for its own sake.  As an intrinsic fidelity to decolonization.  As a rebuke of corporate pedagogy.  I like to remind myself that humans can try to mine asteroids for sustenance but will never invent a way to survive without water. 

I don’t regret how I’ve been expunged from any academic job, but I deeply regret having spent so much effort making myself presentable.  You see, the only power I had, the only dignity left to my name, was tied entirely to recalcitrance.  That’s because it’s necessary to disengage before undertaking any grand gestures of rebellion.  No matter how spectacular it ends up being, resistance always begins with the simple act of withholding approval. 

And, really, what other choice is there anymore?  You can do all the right things, kiss all the right haunches, soldier on with impeccable pragmatism, but in the end if you want life in an industry hellbent on automation then it’s probably advisable to go at least a little bit wild.