The Customs of Obedience in Academe

I once had an acquaintance who nearly rose to the level of friend.  Before forming a personal relationship, we had known of each other for many years and had even met on one occasion, quite by chance, outside of an ice cream shop in Ramallah.  We were young then, both in graduate school, both figuring out what it meant for us, born in the United States, to be Palestinian.  We chatted with a mutual friend serving as mediator and then went our separate ways, aware of each other’s existence in subsequent years through a tight-knit but complicated network of Arab Americans. 

When I was hired as the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut in 2015, a one-year position, I was welcomed on campus by the same not-quite-a-friend (but strong acquaintance) from that summer in Palestine, more than a decade before.  He had been at AUB for a long time, had grown into middle age (as had I), had a family (as did I), and was firmly rooted in Lebanon.  I was new to the country and arrived on campus with a great deal of notoriety, having been fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois a year prior in what became a huge public controversy, so my would-be friend/old acquaintance, being a leader of AUB’s formal but unofficial faculty union, promptly reached out to make use of my presence.  I met with the union to discuss possibilities for growth and engagement and to think through the meaning of academic freedom at a private university in the Middle East. 

We were both busy, maybe a bit aloof, so no deep connection materialized, but we met a few times for coffee and chatted on campus whenever we happened to pass one another.  I had been assigned his old on-campus apartment, so we could always talk about housekeeping and local personalities we knew in common.  I kept abreast of the union’s activities, which consisted mostly of discussion meetings despite the presence of a first-year administration on campus.  There didn’t seem much to contest, in any case.  Precarious sentiment was built into the faculty culture thanks to decades of financial and political instability.  The new administration gave off a hostile vibe beneath its campy, slaphappy veneer.  Anybody who has ever held a job knows that campy and slaphappy is the worst type of boss. 

I was moving from a one-year gig into a permanent faculty position when the administration intervened to cancel the appointment at the behest of various U.S. politicians, including Illinois senator Dick Durbin, in what was unambiguously a violation of hiring protocols (and arguably a violation of academic freedom).  That intervention created some unrest on campus and various colleagues urged the faculty union to take up the cause.  It would have been a wise move if only to set an antagonistic tone against managerial overreach.  The union chose to steer clear of controversy, holding a few public forums where its leaders fielded strategic ideas they had no will or desire to implement, much to the frustration of student-activists and a handful of faculty worried that conciliation would set a bad precedent.  The discourse never moved beyond locution.  My old acquaintance/failed comrade oversaw an elaborate ritual of nothingness.  The union, it turns out, was merely a social club for compradors of the upper-class who liked to play activist. 

A few months later, I and this almost-a-friend-but-now-a-class-antagonist once again went our separate ways, he as the new dean of one of AUB’s colleges and I as a born-again exile in disgrace. 

*****

These memories evoke a lot of feeling along with the obvious analytical possibilities.  They’re the exemplar through which I reflect on issues of obedience and disobedience in academe (and in institutional settings more broadly).  Two people of roughly similar background, with politics somewhere on the same side of the spectrum, apparently possessed of the impulse and motive to move in solidarity.  One is harmed by managerial misconduct and ends up out of a job for the second time in the span of three years.  The other refuses to intervene despite leading a groupuscule devoted to faculty rights, quite possibly having colluded with management, and is then rewarded with a promotion and subsequently featured on the university’s main page smiling with the president.  

Specifics differ campus to campus, but it’s a familiar story.  Punishment and reward in the corporate university.  Social climbing as methodology.  Quid-pro-quo between bosses and compliant employees.  The fragility of comradeship.  Conformity to institutional culture.  The myth of collegiality.  Discursive civility.  Virtuous campus citizenship. 

That last one is critical.  More than anything, you must be a good campus citizen.  It is the unwritten but universal dictum of academic careerism. 

What does it mean to be a good campus citizen?  It can suggest lots of things:  obeying laws and regulations; performing job functions without complaint; tending to the well-being of students and colleagues; entering grades on time; working toward a sense of community.  As an administrative colloquialism, though, it means conforming to notions of citizenship that reinforce inequitable economic structures.  Its dominant connotations are forged and maintained by a local elite obliquely but entirely in its favor.  Good campus citizens may think themselves acting on behest of the collective, but the ruling class actually derives the benefits of goodness among the citizenry, while individual citizens devoted to that version of good collect an assortment of petty rewards.  My erstwhile acquaintance/almost friend/ultimate enemy, for example, likely would have rationalized his treachery as an institutional virtue:  it was his responsibility to ensure that the campus didn’t come undone because of malcontents and undesirables.  By acting on that mandate, which happened to coincide with his self-interest, he actually facilitated the controversy that management wanted to avoid.

In the end, there is no consensus on campus, no unified vision, no universal community, only, as everywhere else, conflicting economic interests.  Fantasies of kinship and inclusion deriving from mainstream notions of civic pride ultimately authorize our own privation.  Goodness and compliance are old bedfellows.  For people systematically excluded from civic life on campus—the dark, the debilitated, the downtrodden—it’s probably more productive and gratifying to seek probity in tenets of bad citizenship. 

No small number of academics cynically perform good citizenship precisely to collect rewards.  It would be foolish to underestimate how cheaply many such academics are willing to sell their compliance:  a title here, a nominal promotion there.  Sometimes mere proximity to the ruling class is motivation enough.  The more ambitious pursue mobility through the administrative ranks.  Others are content to become microcelebrities on social media.  The actual rewards are immaterial.  Obedience in pursuit of rewards is the issue of concern. 

Let’s not ignore the feelings, though, for it is at the level of belonging that acts of obedience and disobedience are most palpable.  Those acts create hierarchies, no doubt, and reinforce class antagonism, but they also produce models of ostracism that can be a terrible burden on a person’s ability to teach and write.  We are not simply political beings on campus, a collection of epithelial cells conveying ideological merchandise to passive consumers.  We are sentient creatures with a deep need to pursue creativity and cooperation.  Cultures of obedience don’t merely facilitate and hinder economic mobility; they intervene at levels of sensibility and devotion, as well.  Far from being the peaceable, enlightened environment as represented by Hollywood, college can be a place of want and dispossession.  It often feels as if we’ve ceased to be human and are instead atomized as pixels in spreadsheets quantifying our productivity. 

Because the orders come down every year, right on time—i.e., when they’re least welcome—from some distant organ on campus populated by a squadron of obscure bureaucrats nobody knows as actual flesh and bone: 

Assess your teaching. 

Measure your impact. 

Explain your value. 

Something something outcomes. 

Rank your scholarship. 

Evaluate your visibility. 

And so we fill online forms in states of confusion, addled and disembodied.  Then we submit them into the ether, waiting for the inevitable appearance of an unknown interlocutor who will tell us to try again.  On it goes until we achieve some minimal threshold of qualitative coherence.  This moment arrives with a great sense of relief, for, despite not understanding anything of the system to which we robotically surrendered, we will have finally been counted. 

*****

We cannot speak of obedience without also considering structures of power.  And we cannot consider disobedience without speaking of powerlessness.  Our task is to understand and then subvert the customs maintaining this equation.  Let’s start with a quick assessment of the workplace. 

In recent years, much has been said on all points of the spectrum about the decline of the modern university, where so many issues of censorship, repression, free speech, curriculum, representation, and class warfare find expression.  Most people have a strong opinion about academe that matches to a broader ideological inclination.  

I’ve spent many years hammering on the failures of modern academe—its corporate mentality, its discursive hypocrisies, its administrative bloat, its appalling labor practices—but have always considered it worthy of struggle, both as a setting and a subject.  If the university is in fact redeemable, then it can only be redeemed concurrent to a broader social transformation.  We don’t speak of universities without also speaking of the geographies in which they are situated, even when we imagine campus to be exceptional.  From 2017 to 2022, I held no academic appointments or teaching jobs.  During that half-decade, intent on forgetting anything to do with the institution or the culture, academe was still unavoidable.  My social media feeds were filled with the travails (and occasional joys) of former colleagues and articles about the quirky goings-on unique to sites of higher learning.  “College,” as both a romanticized geography and a rhetorical battleground, is a ubiquitous feature of America’s self-image and in turn a mainstay of its political discourse.  It occupies a prominent position in the cultural imagination.  It isn’t by accident that so many of the controversies that burn through the commentariat originate on campus.  I tried like hell to avoid it, but academe kept showing up wherever my mind wandered. 

The university isn’t so much a symbol or lodestar as it is an entire semiotics of inequality.  Its self-made image as an Arcadia somehow outside of the “real world,” benighted and innocent, only makes it more effective as a conduit of oppression.  It is in fact symbiotic with the real world, processing and reproducing the same prejudices and labor practices of every other industry under capitalism. 

If we struggle for a better society, then we are by necessity struggling to redeem systems of higher education (which doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re trying to redeem them). 

What form do these struggles assume?  What tensions do they suffer?  Who are their principals and observers? 

These questions aren’t abstract.  They are stark and legible, fostered by a great intensity of feeling.  The punishment for disobedience on campus is usually an abiding sense of isolation.  The type of ostracism peculiar to academe can happen when one chooses not to conform socially or intellectually.  At a glance, social nonconformity seems irrelevant, maybe a bit silly, but it is a real peril on campus.  Faculty aggressively uphold make-believe notions of community (which obscure analysis or even acknowledgment of labor iniquities).  They want to organize get-togethers, go out for drinks, attend department functions, wine-and-dine visiting dignitaries, and chitchat in every lounge, footpath, and corridor.  People apt to terseness or timidity—for reasons of introversion, trauma, recalcitrance, or disgust—can earn the dreaded label of “not a good fit,” a purposefully vague metric allowing for all kinds of recrimination.  Being a good fit doesn’t necessarily replace stellar work in the areas of teaching and research, but anyone who fails to earn the label (often predicated on race, gender, sexuality, religion, ideology, or some other peripheral identity) needs to have stellar teaching and research in order to survive.  You can socialize your way into upward mobility, but you can’t become upwardly mobile with a low profile and a middling dossier.  

*****

Academic freedom, the great talisman of conscientious faculty, cannot function in these circumstances.  It is not configured to address social delinquency.  The question of obedience and disobedience darkens the horizon of academic freedom like a billowing thundercloud.  Few issues are of greater concern to faculty, from community colleges to research universities.  There is something close to a universal sense that academic freedom is important, but only halting agreement, at best, about what academic freedom means, or should mean.  On the surface, it would appear that academic freedom gives writers and researchers license to be disobedient, but, paradoxically, it can function as an inducement to obey. 

Rather than offering a conventional defense of academic freedom, then, it might be better to question its utility.  What is its point?  Its purpose?  Its practical realities?  These concerns evolve into broader questions.  How does academic freedom function to the benefit of campus communities (and the communities surrounding any given campus)?  What role might it play in a liberatory politics?  Can it inoculate faculty against the perils of disobedience? 

The answers are largely negative.  Academic freedom, first of all, wasn’t designed to be a form of activism, which is how civil libertarians tend to treat it, if only through unchecked enthusiasm.  And on its own, it has never been a radical proposition.  It was (and remains) an important legal—some would argue moral—device in an industry prone to censure or castigation.  That industry exists within a political culture long disposed to punishing dissent, particularly in any iteration favorable to communism or anti-imperialism.  Academic freedom emerged from the same capitalist system boasting a heavy-handed ruling class.  It endeavors to protect both the system and the system’s critics, which accounts for much of its incongruence.  If the ruling class wants a person punished, then a punishment of some sort is forthcoming and civil liberties can’t do anything to stop it.  At best, civil liberties might offer some recompense after the fact at great professional and emotional cost to the victim.  Nobody can truly be “made whole” after having been disposed of by institutional gatekeepers because such efforts reify the worker’s status as an exilic figure in the labor force, expendable and easily forgotten.  After the University of Illinois fired me, for example, my legal recourse hinged on free speech as a constitutional protection, but that protection couldn’t intervene ahead of the decision to terminate my appointment.  Civil liberties can act as a deterrent by forcing administrators to consider the probable cost of their malfeasance, but civil liberties can’t guarantee that administrators will make prudent decisions or govern in the interests of the communities they purport to serve.  The victims of administrative malfeasance can invoke civil liberties as a potential means of compensation, but any restitution (financial or professional) will require considerable time and resources without any assurance of a favorable outcome.  “Make whole” is a legal term with specific connotations, but I’ve never felt whole in the aftermath of the Illinois fiasco.  It wasn’t my choice to trade a career for infamy. 

When it comes to benefitting communities or liberatory politics or inoculating faculty against ostracism, some scholars would argue that academic freedom shouldn’t do those things.  In this view, the questions I raised at the beginning of this section are misplaced and tendentious.  Academic freedom, the thinking goes, is a safeguard, not an instrument.  Although the perspective normally arises from scholars who prefer nonpartisan campus environments and thus see academic freedom as a way to flatten all political expression into a selfsame incivility, a significant number of observers on the left share the conclusion that academic freedom is no basis for insurgency. 

Academic freedom is not only subject to disagreement about its scope, but also about the conditions of its existence.  It’s easy to support and hold on to as an ideal, but it also has inherent limitations, some based on legal minutia and some based on structural factors.  One structural factor is ideological conformity in academe. 

If we understand universities as constructed to preserve an inequitable status quo, then the liberal establishment on campus, scourge of Republican loudmouths throughout the United States, is itself a fundamentally rightwing formation.  This is particularly true where a revolutionary politics is concerned.  The ruling class seamlessly reproduces power in large part because its supposed antagonists bicker about the same ineffectual strategies into which they’ve been acculturated (electoralism, civic engagement, political access, and visibility, for example).  This acculturation is perhaps the strongest but least obvious form of obedience on campus because it can present as defiant or subversive, helped along by a media industry (social and corporate) addicted to culture wars.  Think of the self-described Marxist professor who aspires to Twitch or YouTube infamy.  What threat does this iteration of Marxism represent to local or international centers of power?  Or think of all the fiery young scholars (surely you know at least one) who rode a collection of radical buzzwords all the way into vice presidential offices. 

This is all to say that obedience and disobedience don’t exist in some binary, some horizontal diagram or bar graph, nor do they neatly function as antonyms.  They are often foils, sometimes partners.  It’s not always clear which of the two we are enacting, or which gradation of the two, anyway.  It depends on the principals (and principles) in any given conflict and on the ethical commonplaces governing the conflict in which obedience or disobedience occurs.  We might imagine a self-described decolonial professor to be constitutionally disobedient, but the corporate university learned long ago how to transform decolonization into a manageable brand.  Really, disobedience can best be measured by the anxiety it causes the social and economic classes tethered to the status quo, including faculty, administrators, donors, politicians, students, and business owners.  Obedience and disobedience aren’t attitudes so much as the material outcomes of one’s ethical choices in this world. 

We can take a narrower view and examine how these matters play out in workplace rituals among faculty.  Peer assessment, for example, is conducive to obedience, as are hiring processes, tenure and promotion committees, faculty senates, journal submissions (and access), conference travel, and cultures of pedigree and prestige.  We don’t participate in these rituals based on merit, but on proximity to resources, and in many cases on reputational benefits accrued through institutional affiliation.  The rituals are also coercive.  We participate of professional (i.e., financial) necessity, aware that we’re always in competition and that we cannot escape malleable (and often arbitrary) standards of excellence.  Choosing a conference or journal, then, can have less to do with affinity or fit than with a practical desire for career mobility.  It’s all well and good, part of real life as an academic, but these considerations defy ideals of free inquiry and objectivity and pursuit of knowledge that dominate the industry’s self-perception.  Then there’s the kind of scholarly and creative work that’s necessary to meet these ubiquitous standards of excellence (or, hell, to merely be passable, if we want to be less ambitious).  It has to find the correct balance between radical affectation and unthreatening prescription, delivered with precise theoretical sophistication, a process that requires heavy acculturation.  There are no apolitical criteria for excellence or productivity, especially the demand to avoid politics for the sake of a prosperous career. 

This phenomenon manifests in material aspects of the job.  There are dozens of ways that the institution generates obedience, explicit and implicit.  One way is by conceptualizing the recalcitrant as infantile or unserious.  Once so marked, these peculiar specimens either become fugitives or objects of scorn.  They lack the stuff for management or movement into elite institutions.  If you’ve noticed that, say, humanities professors in highly-ranked universities all sound eerily similar, if not identical, then there’s no cause for worry:  nothing eerie is afoot.  Those professors were selected for the role based on successful acculturation into the rhetorical customs and class consciousness of the in-group.  (Yes, of course there are exceptions, just as there are exceptions to any class formation, but dwelling on them only tempts us to absolve the formation of its role in preserving the corporate university.)  Class loyalty on campus is ironclad.  It’s a waste of time to expect meaningful labor solidarity from the dissipating caste of tenured professors in whom the institution invests its reputation. 

Campuses present themselves as idyllic sites of free inquiry, but they’re workplaces just like any other institution under capitalism and so competing class interests dictate much of what happens, or much of what is possible.  Administrators like to package the resulting tension as critical thinking.  But the moment critical thinking evolves into an avocation—that is, a practice trained on identifying and undermining systems of power—it becomes unwelcome.  Management (and some faculty) tend to think of critical thinking in the abstract, as a command of theoretical material, for instance, and not as a practice that intervenes in systems of injustice, least of all those on the campus itself.  Critical thinking is tamed precisely at the point that it threatens to deliver on its promise. 

The upshot of these phenomena is not pessimism, as some readers no doubt find me guilty of.  (I’m far from pessimistic.  Attempting to connect with the dispossessed always feels a bit nihilistic to those who see capitalism and its derivatives as somehow redeemable.)  The upshot is a workplace detached from nearly everything that’s supposed to make it attractive.  Sure, there’s joy to be found on campus—with students and colleagues, at food courts and libraries, amid weathered stone and wrought iron, in the gorgeous quads and gardens surrounding us.  All in all it’s a lovely thing to teach college. 

But somebody has to prune the flora and mow the lawns and cook the food and sweep the walkways and polish the granite.  We can’t have idyll without countless hours of unseen labor.  Even on the instructional side of things, the disparities are unavoidable, and increasingly visible.  We all have to answer to hierarchy, whether as victim or beneficiary.  One professor’s mentorship of graduate students is possible only because instructors—colleagues in name only, if that—take on bigger course loads with less pay and job security.  Same with the professor who writes a book every few years.  There’s unglamorous work to be done and its burdens disproportionately affect the wretched and the precarious.  Everything on campus appears in abundance but operates from a place of scarcity. 

*****

Obedience is the counterbalance to struggle.  It takes on numerous, often discordant characteristics in the modern university.  As such, we must decide which version of obedience to explore.  I’m most interested in speech rites and discursive customs.  It’s largely a personal preference, but also an acknowledgment that rhetorical choices define material positions.  We don’t need to believe what we say in order to produce meaning.  And sincerity doesn’t always mean productive speech.  Rhetoric is situational. 

With its emphasis on unfulfilled ideals of individual liberty, the discourse around social justice and activism these days is deeply embedded in the logic of U.S. exceptionalism.  We have little reason to expect any kind of revolutionary change in North America, or the Global North more broadly.  The political terrain is too disaggregated.  Some will ascribe the disaggregation to spooks and saboteurs; some to the predominance of social media; some to a seemingly insurmountable white supremacy; some to widespread infiltration; some to the ongoing logic of settler colonization; and some to a series of personal failures which have no solution.  In truth, ascription is damn-near pointless because the force of arms exists almost entirely with the state.  Police departments constitute their own little militaries, complete with intelligence systems and advanced munitions.  Agitation that manages to avoid cooptation will simply be squashed by a state that prioritizes corporate welfare above all else.  We cannot theorize ourselves out of this frustrating reality. 

But we can find a joy and purpose beyond the restraints of liberal orthodoxy, away from enervating institutional customs guided by endowments and real estate ventures.  We can find joy and purpose by deterritorializing the campus altogether, usurping it from its immediate location and putting it into communication with ideas and activities whence the physical campus extracts its material and intellectual resources.  Palestine.  Hawaii.  Zimbabwe.  Kashmir.  Sudan. Papua New Guinea.  Aotearoa.  Flint.  Standing Rock.  Any place, really, that aims to transform meekness into the inheritance of freedom. 

To speak more plainly:  nothing worth a shit will happen in the United States and Canada.  Forgot a lack of political imagination (itself a debilitating reality).  Shit won’t happen because North America lacks the social conditions necessary for widescale revolutionary action (something only the most disobedient beings on campus want in the first place).  Conditions exist in particular communities—among African Americans, for example, or in certain tribal nations—but even at its strongest, protest in those communities eventually runs up against insurmountable counterforces:  police brutality, systemic repression, media hostility, internal opportunism, liberal backlash, political malfeasance.  And because activism now enjoys real-time coverage, it attracts all manner of social climber and hanger-on in search of the nearest camera, a pitiful archetype that media across the spectrum are happy to elevate.  All the so-called leftist factions filling the digital universe with drama, for instance, emerged from the Bernie Sanders 2015-16 campaign.  It is the same liberalism to which they will return at the first hint of a real insurgency—if, of course, they aren’t already entrenched among the paleoconservatives. 

If you wish to charge me with ranting, I have no rejoinder.  I can only try to ease my shame by pointing out that I don’t rant without aim, or at least without ambition.  A few useful points can be extracted from this depressing survey of North American activism:  first, that intellectualizing revolution can easily become a counterrevolutionary project; and, second, that disobedience isn’t in itself a noble act. 

Regarding the second point:  like any other form of behavior, disobedience is productive or pointless based on the context in which it occurs (and how we choose to define any of the adjectives modifying the term).  Whatever the context, though, revolt requires more than disobedience.  The disobedient must also paradoxically obey certain principles and keep mindful of the collective, specifically by ensuring the dignity and safety of its weakest members.  Activism implicated in any sort of careerism or profit motive betrays those principles.  It is a negative disobedience. 

As to the first point, it requires us to consider the purpose of disobedience when it is unlikely to grow into something momentous.  Here the problem of activists as individual corporations headquartered on social media is at its most troublesome.  It’s easy to ascribe the problem to shitty individuals (of which there are plenty), but the more notable problem is how ideas and alliances are economized as products to be auctioned in an unregulated market.  There’s no reason to mourn the decline of legacy publications, if we can even measure the extent of this supposed decline, but the celebrations of a more egalitarian media ecosystem appear to have been premature.  Let’s suppose that the old gatekeepers have lost some influence.  This diminished influence hasn’t been replaced with anything cohesive.  Forget cohesiveness.  We haven’t even seen a more heterodox range of ideology.  And far from having democratized communication, social media have shifted public discourse into putrid tech conglomerates.  We are ever-more entrapped by imperialist commonplaces, the advertising industry, and State Department propaganda.  What was lost in unilateral flows of information has been replaced by invisible but ubiquitous algorithms, a private source of authority for which no recourse exists. 

This lack of cohesion is evident in today’s corporate university and in many senses drives cultural and curricular developments on campus.  Management is increasingly concerned with enrollments and so smaller departments spend significant time recruiting students (i.e., consumers) into their course offerings lest certain sections get cancelled or, in a nightmare scenario for chairs and instructors, the department is shuttered altogether.  The managerial class increasingly monopolizes resources and deploys them for non-educational purposes (real estate, athletics, investment, patronage, licensing, personal enrichment).  Union-busting remains the main form of negotiation vis-à-vis employees agitating for better labor practices.  Many clerical responsibilities have been outsourced to temp agencies and overseas contractors. 

What’s left of the educational mission, then, functions under constant duress.  Departments, particularly those hard-pressed for external funding, market themselves as if consumer demand, not intellectual utility, justifies their existence.  An enormous, and still growing, pool of contingent instructors oversees classrooms without any real connection to the university.  This not only produces damning economic inequality; it also disrupts continuity and cohesion.  An academic department cannot develop a strong internal culture without stable and satisfied employees.  And students aren’t properly educated when their instructors are overworked and precarious, serving as pedagogical drudges in a debt-inducing marketplace.  Meanwhile, the upward flow of wealth continues uninterrupted by the inconvenience of economic and intellectual uplift.  There is no curricular structure anymore outside of profit. 

How do these matters connect to debates in the broader culture?  To the disaggregated sites of information?  To the lack of ideological coherence?  To the careerism disguised as a public good?  To the methodical diminishment of a revolutionary left?  To the laundering of ideas through individual corporations soliciting followers and subscriptions?  They don’t connect.  They’re the very same phenomenon and occur in only superficially different geographies.  We cannot rightly separate the public domain from the supposedly hermetic world of higher education.  Each geography helps constitute the other.  Just as participants in the subscription economy track right (and, in special cases, left) in order to maximize consumer preference, the capitalist campus conducts its business to satisfy market conditions orchestrated by donors, trustees, and legislators.  The details matter less than the circumstances.  Whatever the direction of these movements, they’re dictated by external forces that limit access to creative modes of thinking and organizing. 

The same ruling class imposes the limitations.  The same ruling class benefits. 

And what happens to us?  The students and teachers and scholars?  We are forced to consume marketing pitches as an alternative to thinking.  In this kind of world, sincerity becomes a dangerous proposition. 

*****

Early in this essay, I mention an elaborate ritual of nothingness in relation to my almost-friend’s leadership of an informal faculty union.  Well, that nothingness is actually something:  a material expression of obedience.  The obedience presents itself as virtuous.  It is effective as a show of remonstration or concern precisely because it amounts to nothing.  Amounting to nothing is a perfect validation of the status quo. 

We have to be careful with categories of “obedience” and “disobedience,” then.  They are ill-defined on their own and even more ambiguous in relation to one another.  It would be nice to have a fixed binary with which to make simple moral choices, but no such convenience is available.  Instead, we need to understand the forces at play in the making of an ideological subject.  Those forces are dynamic and elusive and so understanding them requires the kind of analysis rarely on offer in our new world of social media punditry. 

Obedience implies service.  Yet the masters we serve aren’t always obvious or evident.  Obedience sometimes has religious undertones.  Yet the gods prefer our faith to be a mystery.  Obedience is associated with deferral.  Yet deference can be an important organizing principle. 

The inverse is true of disobedience.  When considering sources of disobedience, we must also consider to whom obedience should be granted (and the form it should take).  With the same action, a union leader can be simultaneously obedient to the managerial class and disobedient to the rank-and-file.  Categorization of the action is less important than which party will be appeased.  Rather than exalting disobedience, we might contemplate whose interests any action is intended to serve.  Outcome supersedes description.  It is easy for disobedience to be a performance. 

Obedience and disobedience, in short, are relational.  Each depends on a local context.  Each is capable of producing reward and punishment.  Each is in continual tension with its counterpart.  The most difficult tension to make sense of is that meaningful disobedience ironically requires fidelity.  One can disobey as a matter of principle, but if that disobedience is to have purpose beyond self-satisfaction then it must create a disturbance.  The site of disturbance reveals the value of the act. 

Let’s put the matter in more specific terms:  the principle of disobedience is important for those who wish to carry on an academic career that serves the downtrodden (a dubious proposition), but modes of disobedience must be subject to constant scrutiny.  Yes, we want to disobey as an act of resistance, or simply as a form of psychological survival, but it’s crucial to outfit disobedience with a strategy and to direct it at the appropriate target. 

Some useful forms of disobedience include boycott (such as the academic boycott of Israeli universities), divestment campaigns (against, say, weapons manufacturers or fossil fuel companies), unionization, occupation of administrative buildings, impeding military and CIA recruiters, strengthening safeguards around sexual assault, and demonstrating against visiting luminaries peddling fascism under the guise of “free speech.”  These actions would be classified as civil disobedience and they are well-known. 

Disobedience should also extend to intellectual work, which can commence by dropping the achingly dull policy analyses that inform or implicitly align with U.S. imperialism.  (This generally happens when Western scholars mindlessly and high-mindedly invoke bourgeois concepts such as “human rights” and “authoritarianism” in relation to societies targeted by the U.S. for regime change or some other kind of military incursion.)  Even the ostensible radicals on campus have a propensity to reproduce the logic of American exceptionalism by adhering to boundaries of civility that nobody explicitly defines even though everybody is fully aware of them. 

Take as an example the Zionist entity’s current genocide (or, more accurately, its intensified genocide).  The commentary from radicals with university affiliations has been varied, but we can see a near-consensus that resistance groups with an Islamic disposition are to be dismissed or opposed.  (Judith Butler, for instance, keeps dreaming of a future without Hamas, which suggests a desire for Palestinians to exist as palatable victims in metropolitan fantasies rather than accepting how Palestinians exist in the actual world.)  For Palestinians, the calculation is considerably more complex, traversing political, military, religious, strategic, and economic concerns.  Primary among those concerns is survival.  The virtuousness of their allies (especially as determined in the metropole) is less important than the existence of a coalition that can serve as a liberatory force or at least as a deterrent to genocide.  (It isn’t lost on anyone that the U.S. and its quislings invest billions to undermine any such coalition.)  How those allies satisfy or repulse intellectual commonplaces in the West matters little to the people attempting, and often failing, to survive unspeakable brutality.  Scholars, of course, are free to expound on matters of geopolitical import, but audiences are wise to evaluate the relevance of that exposition beyond its own milieu. 

There’s a particular class of self-described leftist in North America who makes it a point to condemn regional organizations aligned with Palestine. Such groups are distasteful to Western governments and well-bred thinkers around the world.  Two of them, Hezbollah and Ansar Allah (“Houthis”), have opened new fronts in the current war.  (Ansar Allah, largely comprised of peasants and mountaineers, is particularly impressive, having disrupted global shipping as a counter-embargo to Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip.)  It’s important to consider a speaker’s location within a nexus of competing discourses.  Everything else aside, eagerness to condemn resistance groups fighting for Palestine is a surefire indication of political untrustworthiness.  This is so not simply because the person rehearses a viewpoint welcomed by centers of power, including campus management, but also because it suggests a disturbing level of comfort with U.S. foreign policy.  Take away all the noise and it’s no more complicated than self-described leftists showing themselves as liberal when it matters. 

Refusing to condemn groups operating against unipolar American power (in English, to a Western audience) isn’t an ethical or ideological endorsement of the groups in question.  (It can be, but support isn’t a condition of my analysis.)  It’s a simple understanding that alignment with geopolitical common sense in the metropole forestalls any kind of upheaval, desperately needed in a world rapidly malfunctioning under the direction of a nefarious and insatiable ruling class. 

These compliant radicals purport to raise principled criticism of injustice as a universal ideal, equally applicable in any situation, but in their choice of condemnation, in their choice of language and timing and audience, they simultaneously choose to reify the logic of U.S. imperialism.  They aren’t rewarded with professorships and prominent media platforms through some special insight or scholarly rigor.  Lack of imagination is precisely the attraction. 

And they know it.  Whatever creativity they possess is used in service of convention. 

We cannot be scared to affirm the right of the oppressed to armed resistance, even only as an aperture to more robust discussion.  Or to theorize the end rather than the redemption of settler colonies around the world (including the United States).  These ideas aren’t outlandish to the inhabitants of ghettoes and refugee camps and shanties around the world even if they are to the trouser and button-down set on campus.  The only revolutionary potential in the United States exists in the disreputable spaces of capitalism’s human surplus, the spaces of Blackness, the spaces of migrancy, the spaces of transgression, the spaces of Indigineity.  It’s been this way for many decades and the possibilities of meaningful change grow meeker each year as the comfortably pragmatic denizens of classrooms and podcasts insist with increasing vigor (commensurate with increasing rewards) on being nonviolent, on joining an NGO, on starting a redundant publication, on voting for yet another Democrat. 

Much of it is draped in humanistic piety, as when Naomi Klein implored Western leftists after October 7 to “side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.”  Who could possibly argue with the sentiment?  Children are precious.  Nobody should support their harm.  It’s the kind of comment that manages to sound both obvious and profound, which allows it to tacitly sanction Zionist inhumanity. 

Klein’s philosophizing leaves us with unexamined questions.  Is “the child” a physical entity or simply a rhetorical abstraction?  Which combatants carry “the gun”?  Once they are removed from a material politics, are steel and flesh really any different?  Klein tells us that all children are equal in her formulation, but not all children live equally.  Disparities of power render the Israeli normative in any ontological calculus claiming to be universal and so it is the children of that society who default to the reader’s humanity.  Israeli children enjoy a world of rights and affinities systemically inaccessible to their Palestinian counterparts. 

This doesn’t make Israeli children fair targets.  Of course it doesn’t.  The notion that Palestinians want to harm Israeli children is a red herring deployed to mystify the demonstrable fact that Zionism eliminates Palestinian children out of ideological necessity.  It is not Palestinians, after all, who endlessly fret about birthrates and demography.  Every time a Zionist complains about the growing Palestinian population, they basically admit that children are a line-item subject to veto like any other domestic policy. 

In these flattened perceptions of conflict, the universal is in fact exclusive.  People are fighting outside of history, outside of logic, outside of ethical considerations.  In turn, the pious humanist can say that the pro-Palestine left embraces irrationality as a blind spot or an operating principle.  Klein’s apparent profundity, then, is little more than self-righteous dissimulation.  Zionism chose the gun when its early leaders recognized that force was essential to their project.  The Palestinian child had no say in the matter.  This child isn’t spoken for in the formulation, either.  (Klein’s article never mentions Palestinian children, even after she revised it following heavy criticism.)  We must historicize violence in order to understand its means and ends, its assumptions and consequences, or else we risk talking up a bunch of platitudes that ultimately affirm the status quo.  Klein calls for a “left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied.”  But consistency isn’t universal, either.  Decorated intellectuals, after all, sometimes manage to side with the gun at the exact time that they’re imploring us to choose the child. 

*****

Choosing a path of rejection is undoubtedly bad for one’s upward mobility in academe (Klein has held more than one endowed professorship), but we’re talking about ideas here, not career moves.  No oppressed person on the periphery gives a damn about tenure and promotion in the metropole.  Folks in academe are free to care about those issues, but they shouldn’t mistake where that concern is aligned in the spectrum of global sentiment. 

What does a path of rejection mean?  Mainly rejection of the tired approaches which have proven grossly inadequate to the task of averting poverty and ecocide.  (Such approaches have proven much more effective at granting would-be dissidents access to the upper class.) 

So: 

No more electoralism in reliable four-year increments.  No more uncritical discourse about “authoritarianism” and “human rights,” which, as truisms with assumed meanings, represent the vocabulary of American conquest.  No more symposia about people of the colonies who don’t care what their apparent emissaries in academe have to say.  In short, no more of the academic in our work. 

The point feels especially pressing now that thought-leaders in the West showed up unprepared for the onset of the Zionist entity’s genocide in Gaza, just as they were unprepared for decades of Black insurgency, Indigenous nationalism, and revolutionary uprisings throughout the Global South.  (They were unprepared not from lack of preparation, per se, but because they prepared for the wrong events.)  These thought-leaders are beyond redemption, mostly because they well understand the lucrative possibilities of always being wrong in exactly the right way.  But their audiences have less reason to obey convention. 

It is important to make sure that people associated with Palestine solidarity don’t forget what Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Pramila Jayapal, and other progressive stalwarts have done (or haven’t done) during this genocide, but more important is making sure that our colleagues don’t fall for the next set of frauds cultivated by the liberal establishment.  How does that happen?  With a lot of intervention, for starters, which will result, as it always does, in accusations of purity, sabotage, and childishness.  (Those who enjoy success through painstaking obedience consider themselves uniquely mature.)  The role of the intellectual, so heavily discussed over the decades, has now been streamlined into a forthright metric:  is the intellectual celebrated or abhorred and derided by the managerial classes?  Perhaps we can do away with the category of “intellectual” altogether and invite all people into abhorrence and derision. 

The sense of urgency should unsettle our sensibilities.  Genocide is occurring in full view of the world.  Nazism is seeing a global resurgence.  The natural environment is in conspicuous decline.  Rent is impossible.  Food is inaccessible.  Poverty is inevitable.  People are irascible.  Capitalism tries to resolve its contradictions with ever-growing depravity.  Dissimulation and compatibility don’t merely waste time; they suck away the energy and optimism of anyone, prole or professional, who demands a viable future for this planet.  Urgency is a condition, but it can also be a vocation, such that the exigencies of obedience and disobedience present as instinctual. 

Let’s allow for sabotage rather than accommodation.  Even if we don’t participate directly, it’s useful to affirm already-existing strategies and to offer a contextual understanding of the discontent informing various forms of upheaval.  Let’s return to Palestine as an example.  Affirming various forms of resistance instead of reciting bromides about “democracy” and “coexistence” will shift the conversation in important ways.  Primarily, it will better align the topic of Palestine with political sensibilities inside of Palestine, the supposed site of concern.  Allowing what the West flatly classifies as “violence” to remain verboten is a failure of both allyship and intellectual honesty. There is often a personal cost to treating resistance with the seriousness it deserves.  The risk is unavoidable.  It helps to remember that there is a greater cost for those on the front lines of the resistance we claim to support. 

We might call these varieties of rejection and affirmation revolutionary disobedience. 

The term implies an active sort of comportment.  It counsels provocation rather than retreat, deriving from a simple calculus:  emphasis on the unloved and underrepresented.  You want revolution?  Actual revolution?  Then you have to think like a revolutionary and not like a cipher selling opinions on the internet. 

And you especially have to quit thinking like a liberal, whether it happens by custom or by having been habituated to the rewards.  If you do insist on thinking like a liberal while branding as some kind of leftist, then it would be altogether helpful to drop the nonsense about socialism and the working class.  The first thing a potential comrade needs to know is that you won’t default to liberal commonplaces in a moment of insurgency or gravitate toward reaction once adequately tempted by its benefits. 

These arguments aren’t about being “realistic.”  They ask us to rethink the very concept of realism in the capitalist imagination.  A turn toward the unreal might be our only option if we want to create a world that’s habitable and humane.  And why shouldn’t we be unrealistic?  All our talk of justice is already rooted in fantasy.  Unreality is a much better alternative than what’s currently at hand. 

Maybe it’s time for scholars to disobey our own compunctions—that we’re important or even indispensable, that our education gives us special insight, that innovation would die if we suddenly went away.  Our main compunction, as with all the professions, is to obey class loyalties.  Disobedience should be introspective, then.  We have to disrupt the norms and procedures that advantage the compliant.  How can this be done?  It’s hard to say.  But that it needs doing is by now beyond doubt. 

Do it or don’t do it.  But you can no longer expect audiences to accept social climbing as a method, no matter how meticulously it is branded as courageous or conscientious.  Today’s intellectual economy is growing more competitive and subsequently more insipid.  The change benefits a small class of content creators, but has also increased cynicism among consumers toward the sources of that content.  The revolutionary promise of decentralized information never materialized.  The ruling class is stronger than ever, in no small part based on the consent of those who claim to be its enemy. 

Do it or don’t do it.  Keep in mind, though:  you can go up on the university’s front page, all smiles and sartorial splendor, an avatar of all the great things the institution can offer, happily having avoided the disrepute that comes of the wrong type of obedience, but the world is no longer made to sustain old habits of subservience.  It has grown tremendously precarious, which means it has also become simpler to understand.  So go ahead and make your choice.  We’ll revolt either way.