Anti-studentism

Or: why does everybody hate universities?

There’s a good article by Samuel P. Catlin in Parapraxis Magazine called “The Campus Does Not Exist.” Catlin points out that the logic of campus “security” is structured around the fantasy figure that Lee Edelman calls The Child. Extreme measures are justified insofar as student-Children are under threat, but police/administrative violence can also be applied to students once they’re stripped of citizenship in the academic state and thus made into “non-affiliates,” as we’ve seen in the recent mass arrests at Columbia, NYU, and Yale.

This is accurate as far as it goes, but I think it downplays the sadism directed towards students that’s a complementary (and, these days, remarkably blatant) component of public discourse on higher education. The student is somebody to whom discipline is always rightly forthcoming, discipline that can never be disproportionate enough. Scan any comment section on campus protests and you’ll find no shortage of batshit calls to ruin young peoples’ lives for what are, objectively, minor transgressions. Somehow this isn’t in contradiction with a proclaimed concern for student safety. This concern has now latched onto another version of the Child: the threatened Jew, whose safety is said to be compromised when protests “veer into antisemitism” in ways that the media tends to leave tantalizingly and thus luridly underspecified.

The assaulted Jewish student of philo-/antisemitic fantasy is a version of the sexually menaced Child. This barely-unspoken scenario is infantilizing and by extension antisemitic, however much it may or may not correspond to real discomfort on anyone’s part. It’s also, I think more importantly, a way in which sadistically to enjoy real, potential, or purely hypothetical anti-Jewish violence via concern trolling about it, as is evident in (no less batshit) congressional questions regarding the supposed genocidal intent behind slogans such as “from the river to the sea.” The figure of the student then becomes the vector for the anti-student sadist’s bloodlust. The student inflicts upon Jews the fantasized violence from which only the philo-/antisemite’s actual violence can provide protection. The same people are likely to ridicule “safe spaces” for Ivy League snowflakes. It’s been said that every accusation is a confession, and while I wouldn’t put it quite so programmatically, it’s not a coincidence that talk of rampant antisemitism on campus is so much of a piece with Biden’s claim, or rather threat, that without Israel “there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world that is safe.”

The special rancor of anti-student fantasy must come from the dense overdetermination of higher ed’s role in class reproduction. It ought to be self-evident that the paradigmatic function of universities is to reproduce class. In recent decades this function has partly broken down as degrees become little more than a sorting mechanism even at the lower end of the labor market, rather than a ticket into the bourgeoisie. Ivy League schools, though, retain their class-reproducing function to a greater extent in both reality and representation. The diversification of student bodies (including, very significantly, class diversification, as proletarians have entered the university in mass over the past several decades) has scrambled ideas of what exactly a student is. In particular, the Ivy League student is many things at once: privileged brat, liberal arts major doomed to work at Starbucks for life, future banker, executive, or tech entrepreneur, preppy legacy dullard, affirmative action fraud, dupe of tenured radicals, coddled baby, violent militant.

Some of these valences of The Student figure economic power or class superiority, in which case the fantasy involved is one of revenge. But the modality in which one imagines such revenge converges with The Student’s other, apparently incompatible roles in at least one key way. The Student is preeminently a subject of discipline. Arrogant snowflakes meet the real world, where facts don’t care about your feelings; would-be radicals get job offers rescinded; would-be gender theorists get their dignity stripped in low-paying service jobs. In all of these scenes, a real insight into the falling value of advanced education on the labor market is articulated as schadenfreude, with boss or dean as avenging angel. In this respect, administrative and police violence, in concert with labor discipline, produce the real unity of an otherwise incoherent category. I would suggest, then, that what defines the figure of the student in current discourse is not a set of empirical characteristics but rather susceptibility to discipline as such. A student is a person to whom an expanded range of disciplinary procedures can be applied, since they’re at the mercy of multiple sovereignties. Thus, students can be (and are being) simultaneously arrested by the NYPD, evicted from their homes, and suspended from academic programs. And in Gaza, they are being killed.