Faulty Ivory Towers

An aphorism is a point of departure masquerading as an arrival.

 
People who want nothing more than to be salesmen shouldn’t be running around colleges at all, let alone chosen to run them.

Philosophy lacks a fashion sense, while Theory is a perpetual fashion victim.

The life of the Academy is the gift. The life of the Corporation is the take.

Bad Hominem: The fallacy of decrying truth-telling as name-calling when things are so bad that truth-telling has become indistinguishable from name-calling.

Students seem always to be mistaking good grades for gifts and bad grades for thefts.

Real education never makes profits, only differences.

Reasonable people always win every argument -- because either their own view prevails as the best available one or because their own view changes from a worse to a better one.

If the shoe hurts, you're wearing it.

You say adjunct, I say troubadour.

Iron Laws are made of rubber.

The arc of the moral universe bends towards bendiness.

Every advertisement on a college campus costs the world a lost insight.

Debate Club Warning: Objections practiced in the mirror may be less conclusive than they appear.

Universities tell you something and think tanks sell you something.

Pretensions to unpretentiousness are still pretentious.

An education is something you should be grateful for all your life, not in debt for all your life.

It is needful to norm, but one need not norm normally.

I just found out the term for perpetually precarious adjuncts who blog instead of actually publishing is "alt ac" (alternative academic, as if), so now all my cat's hairballs sound like judgments.

Only in objecting is an object made subject.

The public university is the common cause where common wealth is common sense. Here's to the day when it is a common place.

We only know what we can successfully explain, and the suffering of the teacher at a student's incomprehension is much the same as the student’s, a register of the ignorance to which both are brought by it.

The lesser of two evils is still evil, but the difference between them can still make a difference. Ethics Is Not Politics.

Among many who profess to be atheists one will still find the curious belief that the Universe has preferences in the matter of which words humans use to describe it with and which values humans use to live it with.

Corporatizing higher education differs from arsonists torching the Academy in an insurance scam only in the agonizing pace the place is burning down.

Tenure is a special public affordance, and from those to whom much is given much is rightly demanded. Tenure reviews should give absolutely no consideration to any writing or result that is not made freely available to the general public, without any fees, access restrictions, or proprietary/security expurgations at all.

Saga of the Neoliberal Academy:

One: Faculty outsource governance of the academy to businessmen who care only about profit.
Two: Businessmen then outsource academic faculty to adjuncts and MOOCs for profit.
Three: Academics then express shock at this predictable result as they clean out their desks.
Four: Academy looted until there's nothing left to loot, then businessmen move on to loot elsewhere.
Five: Either civilization dies or academics rebuild academy ripe, soon enough, for looting again. REPEAT.

Intellectuals function either as props for the administration of incumbent elites or as prompts for the admonition of incumbent elites.

There are no "thought leaders." Thought isn't going anywhere.

It really is a shame the phrase "extractive-industrial white-racist patriarchal corporate-militarism" is unwieldy for sloganeering purposes.

Why is it that when you hold your ear up to a graduate student's paper that copiously quotes Deleuze you can always hear the ocean?

Describing oneself as a "Deleuzian" is like declaring oneself a "Johnny Carsonian." Only fancying oneself "Zizekian" would be worse.

Aphorisms rarely bring us to qualified claims where true wisdom resides, but they can provoke us out of unqualified claims where false wisdom resides.

Distracting an itch can be quite as good as scratching it.

Conspiracist: "We're Just Asking Questions!"
Translation: "We're Just Basking in Unanswerables."

Criticality, like science more generally, depends equally on an acceptance that any belief can be up for grabs, but also that all beliefs cannot be up for grabs at once and certainly not belief as such.

Easier done than said is true at least as often as the converse.

Being positive about what isn't positive is more negative than being negative.

Autocorrect: Thar is no they're their.

All theory depends on the paradoxical recognition that anything can be questioned but everything cannot be.

Every belief, even true ones, costs us something. Indeed, what we take be false, above all, is a belief we take to cost us too much.

One of the best ways to respect someone's opinion is to disagree with it, even disagreeably, in public.

Facts are made and not found, they are made to be found, and in being found, found to be founding.

Too much theory connects the dots and leaves us with stick figures.

Knowing what to expect is different from knowing what should be.

What distinguishes modes of inquiry from one another is what will count as an argument in each. This is more a matter of style than is generally conceded.

In this era of grade inflation I will occasionally assign a student an E for Effort, bearing in mind it is, after all, the letter that comes between D and F.

If you are an atheist who believes in free markets or who believes evolution applies to history or culture you are not an atheist after all.

Being literally misanthropic is no less paradoxical than being figuratively misantropic.

It isn't an accident that "Un-PC" is the tag always accompanying an ugly lie someone more privileged uses to bully someone more precarious.

Students, I find, are unalive to deadlines.

Philosophers are right to declare universals indispensable, but philosophers are wrong to spend so much time trying to tell us what these are rather than listening for what they are becoming.

Up with pessimism!

I don't understand people who worry so much about death. Complete idiots die every day. You'll manage dying perfectly fine.

It is important always to remember that thought is much bigger than philosophy, that odd literary genre for mostly white guys still preoccupied with the preoccupations of Plato.

I still await the philosophy that is more than mansplaining.

Never mistake life for a theoretical exercise, and always watch out for the theatrically theoretical gesture of being anti-theoretical.

When you are in a defensive crouch even a righteous wind at your back just makes your position more precarious, but stand up and that wind will propel you.

Words are actions, and the actions that speak louder than words are often also dumb.

All science is politics, hence it is not the politicization of technoscience policy but its immoralization that is the trouble.

Irritation is my Muse.

Try not to let the way you're right distract you entirely from the ways you're wrong.

In the past of every fact, a figure. At the heart of every fact, a fetish.

Only those who have forgotten or never lived the double consciousness of the threatened margin could pronounce irony a vehicle of despair, since it is irony that provides for many of us the only way to survive the world or find any beauty in it at all.

Quite a lot of theory amounts to explaining jokes so they're not funny anymore.

To recognize that one is ridiculous is a precondition for indulging in ridicule.

Sarcasm is like irony, but without the courage of conviction.

All literature is blowing air through a hole.

Comedy routines compensate routine tragedies.

What's literality without a little glitterality?

Ruthlessness may be bright, but real intelligence is warm.

Every hot take is on the take.

Love isn't for objects, but for objections.

The inexperienced often know everything. The experienced know better.

Those who can, teach.
Those who can't, sell.

However much we know we always know there is more going on than we know. Among other things, this means we can never know enough to despair.