Dear Critical Geographers,

Jamie Heckert forwarded my call for strategies to battle the 
neoliberalization of university life to this listserv, and was kind enough 
to forward the responses from the thread that developed.  I've just 
subscribed to the critical geography forum, in order to add my two cents to 
a few of the interesting points that were made.  I had to grin when I read 
Christopher Niedt's assumption that this call for ideas was meant to 
encourage "big tent"brainstorming.  The list is going to be published in an 
upcoming issue of Anthropology News, which is the general monthly newspaper 
of the American Anthropology Association. But my own origins and alliances 
are quite distant from the "big tent."  Coming from a low-income, inner-city 
background, the list was in fact just one of my latest strategies. You see, 
I am always looking for new ways to educate "academics," whom I find, as a 
group, to be often immensely sheltered and naive.  But they also have such 
power, and so I continue to try...  To try, that is, to knock down the posts 
that hold up the "big tent," as it were (a piece that I wrote in a Monthly 
Review Press ed. volume, entitled _More Unequal_, elaborates on my 
perspective.... see http://www.monthlyreview.org/moreunequal.htm).

This leads me to the second point.  Salvatore Engel-DiMauro wrote that 
"other people" have more serious problems than the problems of academics, 
and that he will focus on these.  This is a noble statement. But can such a 
separation actually be made?  After all, one of the most serious problems 
that "other people" have is the trickle down effect of social Darwinist 
thinking that stems from academia.   The advocacy / research work that I do 
has been with the  unemployed (in eastern Germany) and with prisoners (in 
the U.S.).  And in the interviews I've done, what comes up time and time 
again is the fact that they are _worth_ something too. They are 
_intelligent_ too.  Once you've gotten to correspond with a few dozen 
African American men who are pent up in permanent solitary confinement, 
where they are trying to understand world politics and to teach themselves 
Swahili, and autodidactically study law... And from where they are telling 
you that they wish they'd cared about education more, before they'd gotten 
in trouble ...  It strikes you, then, ... the extent to which universities 
are institutions of thievery. They steal the right to self-actualization and 
sell it back to a chosen few ... informing the rest that they are not good 
enough.

In the shadow of a collapsed mill industry, I grew up in a working-class 
neighborhood that had a 70% high school drop out rate, which had remained 
consistent over three generations. I say "had" only because the local 
population has now been dispersed to the outskirts of the city, as the Ivy 
League university of Johns Hopkins encroaches upon the area, gentrifying it, 
dramatically raising property values, and creating a retro urban scene that 
literally caricatures the local folk. I'm referring to a neighborhood in 
Baltimore (the subject of some of Harvey's writings). And, if you were to 
walk around there today, in the back alleys you would see thin, hollow 
people with no hope in their eyes, shooting up heroin.  The police regularly 
drive down the back alleys, trying to round them up. And in the main 
shopping district (where the thrift stores have been replaced by antique 
shops), you will see a swarm of happy Johns Hopkins students ... sporting 
faddish pseudo-beehives and granny glasses, and mimicking the local dialect 
... saying "how ya doing HON?," in order to prove to each other that they've 
really, truly made it out of the suburbs.  They have transformed the local 
summer fair (of my childhood) into what is now called the "hon festival," 
where they actually have a competition, in which the contestants are all 
gentrifies and Hopkins students, who dress up like "white trash" and compete 
for prizes.

For, you see, in this "post-industrial" city, and in many others, THE 
LARGEST EMPLOYER IS THE IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITY. The largest employer is Johns 
Hopkins.  There is no separating academia from the "real world," as much as 
we'd like to pretend.  And since this the case, we might wish to do 
something about the fact that only 3-4 percent of tenured/tenure-track 
college professors come from low-income or working class backgrounds. And 
most of them were hired in 60s, during the post-WWII expansion of higher 
education.  No wonder our discourse is so fundamentally naive... We are 
reinventing the other, in order that we might study it. We continue, 
glossy-eyed, to following the mythical civilizing traditions of positivism. 
The sad truth is that we are so sure that these "other people" will never be 
included in academic culture, that the very idea of it strikes us as a non 
sequitor.

I may not be saying anything that you don't already know.  But I just had 
write response. Because I thought hadn't heard the "big tent" before, and 
thought it was very funny.

Angela