1/Posturing, power abuse, self-serving politics is rife in an academy whose mechanism of institutional reproduction is broken. But the university is not a realm apart, but a hothouse of contradictions that bedevil all power-elite institutions where liberal complacency reigned.

2/Contradictions are historical. For those of us who went to grad school in the 1990s, the current moment is a feedback loop: identity politics, political correctness, sexualized power dynamics, faux/irresponsible/tenured radicalism are back on the table as what ails academia.

3/The debates are ideological in that they form second order relationships to actual conditions. If we learned one thing from the grad student union campaigns of the earlier moment, it was that the actual problem was a model of informal power embedded in corporate administration.

4/Academia was no longer reactionary guild, nor liberal meritocracy (let alone citizen-training ground), but a corporate-consumerist enterprise. This did not remove the university from ordinary strictures, quite the contrary.

5/With corporate restructuring came the academic star system, substitution of narrow, sequestered diversity criteria for genuinely egalitarian access, rising costs, intensified evaluation and bloated administration, super-exploitation of contingent faculty and graduate students.

6/The university remains an important site of struggle and arena for the transmission of radical knowledge, but strategies for changing it should be focused on changing/challenging the aforementioned. To the extent that they are not, the charge of defending privilege resonates.

7/As an aside (and imo) tenured radicals are uncommon. Of them, few are "stars,” or especially well compensated. When they attain prominence, they are often isolated among their peers, but they’ve been life-saving to those who entered the university to escape a political desert.