When Critical Thinking Becomes Undesirable: Ivana Perić Interviews Steven Salaita

This is the original English version of a conversation I recently had with Ivana Perić of Novosti, which was translated into Croatian and can be found here.

Ivana Perić: In your address delivered for the students at Virginia Tech, you talk about punishment and reward in the corporate university. Let’s start the same way you start in your address, by mapping out your relationship with Virginia Tech?

Steven Salaita: It’s a complicated relationship.  A lot of people in my family and in my wife’s family went to Virginia Tech, including my father and both of my siblings.  I spent a lot of time on campus in my youth, so when I was offered a job there it felt like an exciting opportunity.  Tech is the kind of place where retention is a concern, especially with young faculty and faculty of color.  It wasn’t a worry with me.  My wife and I were thrilled to be in Blacksburg.  But in the end, as with all campuses, Tech’s interests aligned with centers of power—in this case military power—and I had to go.  It wasn’t a pleasant separation. 

IP: How do you now look upon the essay that got you in trouble and ostracized in academia?

SS: I find it funny that the essay, which argues that we should be skeptical of compulsory patriotism, elicited such a strong response.  I like the essay.  It’s well-written and lively, but politically it’s rather tame, to the point that I would now disavow a few of the arguments I made.  I suppose it goes to show that criticizing the military or police is a risky proposition in the United States, even in settings where such criticism would ostensibly be welcome. 

IP: What are those arguments that you would now disavow?

SS: Primarily my comment that I wouldn’t object if my child were to one day join the military.  As he gets closer to the legal age of adulthood I realize that the prospect of serving in such a corrupt and destructive force is mortifying.  I’m also less moved by the sense of adventurism that often leads young men into the military.  I’ve come to realize that it’s less a spontaneous youthfulness than a sensibility cultivated quite deliberately and systematically for the purpose of exploitation.  Having said that, I still maintain that people are capable of great destruction from the dull environs of a cubicle or a corner office. 

IP: You don’t just talk about your individual case, you write about  ostracism being an intrinsic feature of campus life. Can you elaborate on that?

SS: Sure.  Campuses like to present themselves as idyllic sites of free inquiry or whatever, 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.  There are dozens of ways that the institution generates obedience, explicit and implicit.  One way is by outfitting anyone seen as too radical with labels such as “political” or “polemical,” which are pejoratives in the academic lexicon.  Once so marked, the radical either becomes a fugitive or an object of scorn. 

IP: What about critical thinking? What are the ways in which it becomes more of a brand than an avocation in a corporate university?

SS: The moment it becomes an avocation—that is, a practice trained on identifying and undermining systems of power—it becomes unwelcome.  Administrators and many faculty like to think of critical thinking in the abstract, as a command of theoretical material, say, 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. 

IP: You also write about class and class interests, how corporate universities  accommodate reactionaries because they’re reliable soldiers of the same class interests. Could we unpack that class core of the matter more?

SS: I can try!  Basically, despite all the rightwing hullabaloo about academe being a Marxist dystopia, the institutions are fundamentally conservative.  I don’t mean “conservative” strictly in the sense of the U.S. spectrum—as Republican or libertarian or so forth.  I mean to identify the economic mission, and thus the class structure, of academe.  In the end—and often in the beginning—the university exists to serve various sites of power:  imperialist power, corporate power, carceral power, police power.  It is by nature more accommodating of Nazis and sexual predators than of anti-Zionism or Black liberation or any other movement aimed at upending the status quo.  This isn’t to say that individual Nazis or sexual predators are necessarily tolerated, or that an individual anti-Zionist is doomed.  These things depend on local circumstances.  But in the aggregate, you’re more likely to succeed in the industry with a reactionary outlook than with a liberatory one—in other words, by carrying water for those centers of power to which the institution is fundamentally devoted.  Nazis have always been more palatable than communists to the U.S. ruling class, for example. 

IP: How do you understand academic freedom?

SS: In a traditional way, probably a disappointingly traditional way.  It’s a legal guarantee of free inquiry.  Of course, this definition only functions in a vacuum.  In reality, disparities of power and public sentiment profoundly influence how we might define academic freedom and how it is practiced.  But if we strip away that context (a bad idea), I’d define it pretty much as it exists at present:  the ability to pursue controversial research or to engage in public discourse without fear of recrimination.  Increasingly I see academic freedom as a limited commodity.  As such, its value increases as fewer people compete for access.  This induces conformity more than dissent. 

IP: You conclude that, in the current configuration of the corporate university, much of the labor is devoted to surviving mendacity. How can that be flipped? You like the concept of recalcitrance and go back to it a lot – tell us more about it?

SS: I’ve always liked the idea of recalcitrance, which I define essentially as a form of refusal.  “I refuse to participate in the aspects of the university that reproduce injustice or that cause harm to others.”  This is an extremely difficult, if not impossible task, so it requires a strong sense of one’s own ethical compunctions.  It’s best really to think of it as a principle that guides the various choices with which one is confronted.  “How might I navigate a toxic environment while causing the least harm to others and the least damage to my own sanity?”  Of course the ultimate expression of recalcitrance is getting the hell out of the industry altogether.  I don’t know that it can be flipped in the current environment.  Universities aren’t going to change to make their employees feel better.  We have to change the universities themselves and imagine what they could be in the hands of more compassionate stakeholders.  I forgive anyone who considers them a lost cause. 

IP: How can recalcitrance, refusal, dissent, be nurtured collectively? So that it doesn’t end up as a form of self-help, a partial solution for an individual?

SS: It’s very easy to become an individual solution, which is useful to the extent that we need to be able to function in the world.  But I think it has tremendous collective potential.  Recalcitrance isn’t simply about maintaining one’s sense of personal dignity, but also about demanding organizational dignity.  A mass politics is only as good as its constituent parts.  In the U.S. left, we’re constantly asked to overlook institutional abuses or to defer the liberation of this or that downtrodden group for the sake of access or electoral success.  Recalcitrance functions at an organizational level by nurturing a community ethos.  It says, no, we won’t accept less than revolutionary devotion from those who purport to speak in our name. 

IP: Your gig with American University of Beirut also ended badly. Was it the same story as with Virginia Tech, are there other layers to AUB experience? And what do you have now to say to those who still equate criticism of Zionist policies with antisemitism?

SS: Yeah, primarily that it’s located in the Arab World, specifically in a country with a hostile relationship to Israel.  That Zionists managed to interfere on campus without much trouble from faculty remains a blight on the university’s record.  As to the second question, I’d point out that we unfortunately have tons of evidence that conflating criticism of Israel with “antisemitism” is a cynical tactic to punish dissenting journalists, activists, scholars, artists, and so forth.  A lot of very good people have in fact been punished and they should be the subjects of our concern and analysis  In the end, as Palestinians, it is our prerogative to speak of our oppressor in a language that satisfies our predilections as the aggrieved party.  If the oppressor doesn’t like it, then the oppressor ought to introspect rather than accuse. 

IP: You went from being a professor to being a bus driver, and you wrote some truly beautiful and insightful essays about that on your blog No flags, no slogans. Among many things, you write about how driving is a bad way to know a place. How is that so, particularly in the USA?

SS: The world passes too quickly from behind the wheel of a car.  You’re focused on the road, on other drivers, on the radio, on speedtraps, on speed itself.  So you get sucked into the unsatisfying rythm of suburban life.  The USA, with a few exceptions, is set up for cars, not pedestrians, and so it’s difficult to foster a sense of place, a sense of community.  We rush around to the demoralizing tempo of commerce and industry.  You’re of a piece with that lifestyle.  When you walk or bike, you see things that are otherwise unnoticeable—that is, things constructed to exist outside the view of normal life:  gardens and window decorations and children’s toys and hidden passages and walking trails and dozens of little animals.  If you go slowly enough, you can even picture the faint possibility of a civic life. 

IP: What is it about cul-de-sac, you dedicate a lot of thinking to it?

SS: It’s an architectural dud, a kind of spatial aggression, really.  I’m speaking here of the U.S. cul-de-sac.  I don’t know how they exist in the urban landscapes of other countries.  But in the United States, they waste land and sequester people from one another.  They are desirable in part because they keep undesirables away, under the guise of privacy.  So as a physical design they’re insidious and unappealing, and as a symbolic phenomenon they embody a specific kind of American alienation wherein people feel simultaneously entrapped and exceptional. 

IP: You have an An Honest Living book forthcoming with Fordham University Press. What can we expect in it and when?

SS: I took the essay you reference earlier, “An Honest Living,” and wrote it out into an entire book.  It’s a deeply personal narrative that I very much hope will connect with readers.  I tried my best to make some of the travails (and joys) I describe relatable to anyone who cares to give it a read.  It’s scheduled to come out in February 2024.