I realize I’ve been on a Vijay Prashad kick lately, but, well, he’s amazing. I had some nostalgic feelings listening to this talk since it was given among my old friends and comrades at UMass. (The Graduate Employee Org. (GEO)–my old union–hosted this year’s Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) conference and Prashad was invited to give the keynote.)
His subject, broadly speaking is the financialization (as opposed to “privitization” or “corporatization”) of higher ed. in the US. His analysis is a striking one in several respects. I’m particularly interested in: 1) his contextualization of the cultural/economic shifts in higher education vis-a-vis the return of finance capital to “the West” and the cannibalization of the state under neoliberalism in a wide range of sectors; 2) his discussion of students as consumers and multiculturalism vs. anti-racism and anti-systemic thinking; 3) his understanding of the shifting–rather than shrinking–state in the contemporary moment, particularly with the respect to the state’s role as dispenser of “justice,” from the classroom to the prison; 4) his argument about the necessity of a major cultural shift which would mean defeating the terms of financialization (rather than acceding to neoclassical/financialized logic and being forced to constantly struggle within the warped terms of debate it presents as the “reality” of the situation); and 5) his assertion that we cannot deal with financialization unless we deal with the ways that race is fractured through it, including understanding why concepts like “meritocracy” are fundamentally racist.
Enjoy:
http://www.traprockpeace.org/edrussell/VijayPrishad11Aug07_AImedia.mp3
(Prashad talk actually begins about 2:30 into the file.)
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