kateperl replied to your post: i know a lot of people are still in school, like...
im considering going into academia! there’s just something so thrilling about being in the intellectual community……and ive had some incredibly inspiring professors. still not sure though :P
if you went into academia i'm sure you would challenge the confines of intellectualism, the exclusivity of it and you would fight to make it more accessible. institutionally i've seen it to be very daunting, only because the best of intentions usually still results in the production of disconnected analysis which.. let's be honest we can probably at this point provide on forums like this. (just as CLASSically inaccessible, albeit maybe a bit less, imo)
that's not to say that schools, their spaces, should and cannot be reapropriated for some sort of revolutionary pedagogy. from what i've seen though even though a lot of really vibrant learning can take place it still usually takes place in some form or structure and reinforces the observation and consumption of ideas rather than the practice or expanding of them. if you were a grad student, however, you could probably practice horizontal discretion as a TA. and if one simultaneously fought to make the knowledge accessible, open sourced, available to the community, etc. but in terms of tenure, the academic industrial complex, the administration, government funding etc you'd definitely have your work cut out for you.
formal institutions of education really fuck with me in retrospect. like i think we can do all the similar things in free schools, but these 'universities' have immeasurable resources that can be reapropriated too. i just think back to all these schools that had great leaders come visit- malcom x, mario savio, to speak, to breathe their struggle into halls at students. i mean i know i've been impacted by speakers but there is something so sterile about some academic environments, especially the ones that try to speak for and gentrify the surrounding community (most.)
so perhaps this is what it shows- that we NEED agitators in classrooms, unapologetic about revolution and overturning the social order that produces students as human capital- good workers. perhaps we need subversives exploding the meaning of intellectual in these spaces, blurring the lines, listening to the communities that are affected by these exclusive academic institutions.