Scott Beauchamp
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An Aggregate of Last Moments

the university as not quite radical enough

1/3/2019

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"For all the iconoclastic destruction of symbolic representations of the past, such as Yale changing the name of its residential dorms or Princeton students demanding the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from various buildings, the question always remains: why stop there? Isn’t the school itself—its organizational structure as much as its architecture—tainted by its legacy? Indeed, aren’t most university campuses memorials writ large for oppressors past? Why not demand an entirely new school? Or no school at all?

The most interesting aspect of campus faux radicalism isn’t the charge that they’ve “gone too far” but interpreting what it means that they stop where they do. Objects are destroyed. Demands are leveled. But the institution itself rolls along, usually metastasizing. What this suggests is that the drama of these protests unfolds along a predetermined course and the ends it serves are radical in name only. In tying the logic of the campus protest so tightly to the university system itself—making demands that only the university can answer to, usually granting the administration with even more power in order to arbitrate the problems of the day and meet the demands of the students—what this campus unrests serves to actually do is expand the authority and power of the university itself."

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    Scott Beauchamp

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