I think there’s very much a ‘you can’t have it both ways’ element here: the complete businessification of HE discourse actually makes it harder to go culture wars that specific front (doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, see trans issues, where a segment of crazy transphobia here is… salient).

And I think the culture war at uni salience also can’t be the same as in the US because we don’t have the same idea of what uni is for, and since the establishment of the idea of ‘uni as nothing more than professional training’ there’s even less space for arguing unis are cultural agents?

On the latter I have many colleagues who are entirely convinced it’s all about vocational stuff (lambasting reading as non inclusive, making fun of research as ‘not authentic learning’) and argue that devaluing our work is good for inclusivity.

So I’m not sure it’s always management taking ‘easy’ decisions, but just adopting this bizarre enthusiasm for metrics, competition with other unis and most importantly the idea of ‘vocational learning as inclusive’.

Also if there’s an ideological element to government reactions to the looming crisis, it’s not really the same ideology? In the UK it’s a lot more the businessification of universities than actually attacking them as evil.

Ah oui. Je ne l’ai pas annoncé ici en septembre, même si j’aurais dû, peut-être 😉 je reste jusqu’à fin janvier. Trop court, hélas !

It’s also kinda interesting how much Londoners’ self image is so attached to how Paris is supposedly filthy and dysfunctional, when in actual fact it’s the exact opposite today. And it’s a bit hard to tell them: you know the Liz Line is just a clear RER with a 50-year delay.

But yeah, I also get the argument. I think there’s that weird disconnect between how some people keep on shouting how London is the GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD and how much it’s all ripping in the seams and the Liz Line was “look, we’ve still got it!”.

Tvärbanan är också bara tvärbanan? Den är bra (ännu bättre när man bor i Årsta). Men ändå, det känns inte så emotionellt stort som gula linjen.

Aren’t inhabitants of every big city emotional about a new tube line? I remember when the 14 opened in Paris in the 90s and it was a big thing for people. And I can only imagine the joy when gula linjen opens in Stockholm (whenever that happens).

So my great aunt in Paris just sent me a screen capture of that post, complaining about the “masochism” of NY Jews, and telling me “my wokisme” will be the end of us all. And anyone fueling this dangerous nonsense is just a pyromaniac.

Also I just realised how many reposts with very personal stories that thing got, because it’s utterly bleeding insane.

Instead, they need to fight tooth and nail as long as a good majority of voters still find that kind of politics unacceptable and morally repugnant. Otherwise all they do is to weaken any belief in the necessity of goodwill in politics and society as a whole. And it might be too late afterwards.

The second is that it’s really important to just resist that normalisation before it happens. That’s why Labour’s slow response to the latest Tory radicalisation is so self defeating. It reeks of accepting tacitly that voters now want nastiness and they need to abide by the tide of history. 3/4

And that means two very different things to resist that new far-right energy (and normalisation). The first is that it’s very hard to regain voters who have normalised the idea of nastiness as a political value, as it implies accepting new trade-offs, including a dog-eat-dog view of politics. 2/4