A collective of campus radicals who seek to “reveal and challenge the North American university as a site working at the junction of settler-colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy and other systems of domination and exploitation” will host a brainstorming session early next month at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Promotional literature for the “Undercommoning” workshop – although rife with esoteric jargon, victimization claptrap, and academic gobbledygook – essentially explains that the daylong conference aims to equip participants with ideas on how to attack and exploit the American university from within, The College Fix reports.
Organizers, who tout the mantra “the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one,” have planned sessions on investigating university finances, what it means to be a thief, how to construct political narratives, and how to “destabilize hegemonic spatial representations.”
Thankfully, not all UW-M students agree this conference is a good use of a public university’s resources.
“If you read through the scribblings of the Maoists who are set to attend the ‘thief seminar,’ you will find, on the one hand, the same jargon soup that sludges up all writing on the American left,” UW-M graduate student Jason Morgan said in an email to The College Fix. “The participants almost universally describe themselves as some species of queer, trans, feminist, anti-capitalist, post-colonialist, ethnically oppressed, and/or class warrior.”
Morgan added he believes these scholars are out of touch with reality.
“[T]there is the startling failure of these Starbucks radicals to understand why in the world, for example, the taxpayers of the great state of Wisconsin recently decided to whack them with a big pay cut,” he said. “Insulting the taxpayers who fund your ‘thief seminars’ is all well and good, but when those same taxpayers later decide to fund a basketball team over your Occupy Madison rehearsal workshop, why act so shocked, shocked!, that such an eventuality should come to pass?”