K: Corporate University

Hansen
Fall 2015

Notes: I think this could either be read as an answer to a microagression K’s as it’s own piece of
paper or you can use it as turns against an identity politics argument.

Thesis: The corporate campus controls messages and shifts focus so that we avoid
discussion over the real problems. This undermines the purpose of the space by
sanitizing education while leaving dangerous campus housing and administration.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-
inc.html?referrer=&_r=0

1 The Corporate Campus

-Universities are aesthetically conforming to the corporate ideal: lawns, architecture, allocation
of space, land expansion

-Enrolling sets one up in an array of for-profit systems: credit cards, student loans, ticket master,
math xl, school athletic apparel by Nike and Under Armour -- even car insurance, spring break
packages, healthcare all offered by for profit entities existing on campus. This isn’t the worst
kind of domination.

-The All-Administrative University: It’s not uncommon for schools to employ more administrators
than professors. This causes a world of pitiless surveillance; every segment of campus life has
administrators who need to manage it into a single, totalizing vision. This mirrors the use of
middle managers to control the corporation. “American college is slowly becoming as
meticulously art-directed and branded as a J. Crew catalog.”

-Campus political culture then becomes fashionable in the same way campus aesthetics are.
The customer relationship with professors curtails ideas of freedom of expression.

2 Rashomon effect undermines their analysis

-The Rashomon effect is contradictory interpretations of the same event by different people. The
phrase derives from the film Rashomon, where the accounts of the witnesses, suspects, and
victims of a rape and murder are all different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect

-In April, student activists at the University of Michigan temporarily shut down a screening of
‘‘American Sniper.’’ Critics saw students unwilling to be exposed to points of view that they
disagree with; defenders saw members of a campus community rallying against Islamophobia
and the celebration of war. In May, students at Columbia called for trigger warnings on Ovid’s
‘‘Metamorphoses’’ for its depiction of rape and assault. Critics saw sensitivity taken to the point
of inanity; defenders saw students righteously invested in the content of the courses for which
they are paying. With its rigid dichotomies and teams mentality, the usual discussion of campus
intellectual culture seems to reflect all of our worst political debates and has little to offer anyone
who isn’t already a dedicated partisan.

3 Misidentification perpetuated by the corporate campus masks the problem

-Current activists ignore the real threat that student activism poses to education: academic
inquiry. An unhealthy sensitivity means threatens intellectual and academic freedom on
campus. Ideas are then only committed to preempting ideas and in the same way the corporate
world controls the workplace conversation to maintain control, so does the administration of a
campus. This causes us to overly focus on personality flaws and individual agency while
ignoring the structural racism, sexism and oppression that affect the lives of students.
Commented [1]: seems like we could use those args
-”Consider, for example, the infamous case of Laura Kipnis, a professor of film at Northwestern from the summer. The ones centered around how we
conflate oppressivve language with offensive language.
University. In February, she published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education lamenting Right?
a supposed culture of sexual panic on campus. Writing in response to a student-requested
these are quotes from that article we read over the
administrative ban on student-faculty relationships, Kipnis argued that such relationships were summer. i think we should at least use the 2nd one on
not inherently destructive or exploitative. She further argued that the common contemporary here. :)
perception that colleges are sites of mass sexual exploitation is indicative of a new Victorian
-"oppression now doesn’t have to be rooted in anything
take on the sexual lives of young adults. While making her case, Kipnis presented a not entirely material or structural, it can literally just be the politics
sympathetic summary of a complaint of unwanted sexual interest that had been made by a of the personal."
Northwestern undergraduate against a philosophy professor. In response, students held a So I went onto Essex University campus and I meet the
protest, some of them carrying mattresses, calling for formal censure of Kipnis. Worse, multiple pornographer on the train and we politely say hello.
This is a man who has produced porn for years, has
Title IX complaints were filed against Kipnis, claiming that her essay had created a ‘‘chilling given awards to porn sites such as
effect’’ that prevented students from feeling safe to pursue claims of sexual harassment or ExploitedAfricans.com, which completely pornifies
abuse. Incredibly, another university employee who attended Kipnis’s Title IX hearings in her women coming from the Congo on boats, that have to
be fucked by anyone because they’ve got no choice,
support also had Title IX charges filed against him. Kipnis was initially unable to even know the because they’ve got no papers. There is another one
names of her accusers. which is a parody of the John Worboys taxi rapist…
And this man’s given awards to these porn sites and
I’m there getting ready to debate him and we are
The Kipnis affair was extreme, but it demonstrates the double-edged sword that is Title IX. The walking through campus and I see this rag-bag group
law, designed to enforce gender equality on campus, grants members of campus communities of students who’d obviously got up a bit late to meet
me at the actual campus gates, shouting and
broad latitude in charging gender discrimination and mandates formal response from screaming “transphobe,” “violent,” “phobic” this,
universities. The law can be a powerful tool for justice, but like all tools, it can be misused — “phobic” that, at me. And I thought, well, we are living in
Orwellian times as well as McCarthyite times. Because
especially as it ends up wielded by administrative and governmental functionaries. In this way, it in what way is this pornographer, walking through this
becomes an instrument of power, not of the powerless. And because the law compels the self- campus, with no dissent and no concern at all from
protective, legalistic wings of universities to grind into gear, for fear of liability and bad publicity, these so-called feminists and pro-feminist students,
and I’m being screamed at.
invocations of Title IX frequently wrest control of the process and the narrative from student
activists themselves, handing it to bureaucrats, whether governmental or institutional.” And it was that they couldn’t have me speaking
because, [according to] these people who are banning
me, I’m whorephobic, transphobic, biphobic and
4 However student activists aren’t censors -- they’re trapped by the corporate islamophobic. And the articles they chose to highlight
architecture this was me saying, about transgender, “this doesn’t
stand up as a medical diagnosis from the fifties
-”Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been because gender is a social construction.” Whorephobia
struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of was, “the sex trade really harms women and girls.”
Islamophobia was, along with many of my Muslim born
moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating sisters and colleagues, saying that the veil is a symbol
it.” of women’s oppression, like the nuns habit, etc. And
the biphobia accusation wa
-’When your environment so deeply resembles a Fortune 500 company, it makes sense to take
every complaint straight to H.R. I don’t excuse students who so zealously pursue their vision of
campus life that they file Title IX complaints against people whose opinions they don’t like.”

-The system serves its own corporate interests. It’s not the fault of the students that they have
been trained to take advantage of the system, it’s the fault of the system for being problematic.

5 This undermines the space and turns their arguments

-Campuses become too safe and too dangerous. Classrooms are sanitized to the point of
ridiculousness and Greeks and dorms are in a perpetual state of alcoholic fugue.

The alternative is for the judge to reject the sanitization of academic space in favor of
academic freedom or of viewing debate as an academic garden.

Solvency
1 Solves the case
-Academic freedom will reject racist and sexist ideals -- the activists of the 1990’s prove. The
expansion of the Civil Rights Acts and the EEOC’s expansion of protected status prove that
focusing on policy creates real change.

-Shifts the focus to existing structures of oppression. Academic freedom means that we become
open to analyzing the structures of the corporate campus that perpetuate oppression and
insulate itself. This provides a solvency benefit to the alt.

-The alt has us reimagine debate as Purdue’s garden. A place where students and faculty can
cultivate ideas that aren’t controlled by the aesthetics and politics of a corporate campus.

2 Solves misidentification
-Academic freedom means increased exploration of ideas and criticisms of administration. This
allows accurate identifications of problems, which is a prior question to solving any of the
problems.

3 Perm block
(Generic)

-The perm links to the K because it is the corporate acquisition of land and ideas and
appropriating them for its own purpose.