Abolish the Universities!
The darkest ideologies are born in an academic setting – and that’s why I’m leaving
In recent years, on entering my department building on the way to my office at the end of the hall, I always think I’ve just detected an eerie presence. This nearly always confirms as correct because some colleague or other usually roams about. Their presence weighs like a leaden weight on my mind, not because they are particularly unfriendly or unpleasant, though some of them are, but because I know what they are thinking about the world and its problems. I know, because they have told me so in person, on various occasions. I know they think the Covid regime is “doing their best” in stopping a pandemic. They think that Klaus Schwab whose is a real life revenant of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sauron if there ever was one and Bill Gates are “philanthropists”. They also think that critics of the regime are “third positionist right-wingers”, along all the propagandistic things their government and the German speaking media wants them to think. They think that saving energy and transferring their children to a vegan/bug diet (bugs for the proteins) is the right thing to do, and so they think about supporting Ukraine. But make no mistake. They are no victims. They are active perpetrators of evil.
I do not make the Klaus Schwab/Sauron-reference in jest. With atomic clock reliability, the University magazine, the “Journal for Science and Academic Life” is promoting headlines that read like they were copied from the WEF’s Great Reset Agenda: “Eating plants. How we will feed ourselves in the future.” (“1. Broccoli instead of pork cutlets. 2. Weeding, mulching, sowing, harvesting. … 6. Genetically modified corn for everyone!”) Unabashedly, they also talk about Covid 19-vaccine injuries, except they call them “mysterious Sudden Adult Death Syndrome”, a genetic disease, in an aptly titled piece called “Cardiac Arrest. Hereditary diseases are often involved when younger people die of sudden cardiac death. Genetic analyses can prevent further suffering in the affected families.” The audacity, you might think. But this is part of the agenda.
The University serves the interests of money, its financiers, the ruling class. It is and has always been an elite think tank, and the progeny it sprouts are destined state functionaries. It makes no difference that the new hegemony of ideas – whether the identity craze, the newly found belief in authoritarianism statism, the denunciation of bodily autonomy and free speech – now belong to a caricature Left, and yet the only Left we have. Any idea that may challenge University ideology (“trans rights are human rights”, “we stand with Ukraine”) is dégoûtant. The ruling ideas have always been the ideas of the ruling class. And the Left is now the ruling class. Deal with it.
The reason I was left alone in the 10 years that I worked for the University before Covid was that I was no threat: I worked on Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and its Japanese Reception and wrote a book about it that no one (except Peter Green[1]) has read. I deluded myself into thinking that “doing Marx” would be slightly contrarian, but people everywhere applauded me. I was doing theory that was so abstract and philosophical (and yet fundamental to understanding our world) that no one cared. Of course, that changed when I got myself a Twitter account in February 2020. When I started questioning the Covid paradigm and even published a (co-authored) piece that received attention over social media accounts, went on podcasts and started this Substack, things became a little crazier at the University. One of the major letdowns, to begin with, was my department’s handling of the Bratton affair. Benjamin Bratton, we all know this, is a mentally damaged individual. With biting aggressiveness, he follows the activities of his critics on Twitter. Without going into the details too much – listen to this episode of Red Star Radio[2] if you want my take on his book - he found a Tweet that simply proved Bratton’s blatantly fascist inclinations (without calling them such). Bratton went for the author (me) by finding out where I work and writing an email to the Head of Department. I had a sit-down with the boss. Emails were exchanged. I wrote to the HoD and expressed my apologies the University had to be dragged into a complaint from an individual who out of nowhere demanded my resignation because of a Tweet that was entirely unrelated to my employment at the University. The answer from the Sinology professor in charge of HoD was that I “had no reason to be sorry”, he “had a very collegial and friendly exchange with Professor Bratton”, whose concerns were of course taken seriously. He also did not fail to remind me that my Tweet had “crossed a line”. This is another emerging pattern in University policing: not the accuser, by demanding another’s resignation had crossed a line, but a Tweet.
I kept my job, after all, and my direct boss must be thanked for representing the voice of reason in this muddled exchange with the design professor from hell. (After a while, my boss even informed Mr Bratton that he had made himself liable according to Swiss law, by aspersing allegations against an individual at their employer. Being the sorry cunt that he is, Bratton suddenly insisted “it wasn’t all meant that way”.)
It is not as though cancelling attempts were unprecedented at a Swiss University. Only months earlier, a PhD candidate’s supervisor at the prestigious University St. Gallen, a professor of Sinology, had declared to drop out of supervising the thesis, because her student had been critical of Chinese policy in various Tweets. Of course, the obvious reason was officially denied. Everyone knew the obvious: the professor was worried her ties to the Chinese state would be in jeopardy (e.g., denying her visa etc.). The greatest concern of my department then was a repetition of this “scandal”. I was informed that the institution’s reputation was to be safeguarded at all costs, and – in a roundabout way – that employees and colleagues would be thrown under the bus, if necessary. I was told to “check” my “language on social media.” There was not the slightest interest in the matter at hand. It was completely circumstantial to discuss Bratton’s open call to legalise torture and the surveillance state, for example, in his plea for the “Ethics of Being an Object”. All was deferred to matters of decorum. As one friend and former colleague of mine put it at the time: “Interesting to see the University’s priorities shifting from participating in social debate towards its technocratic management.”
The University has become a secular version of Hell. It safeguards the transaction of ideas and “innovations” for the benefit of the political establishment in a never-ending self-serving circle. The sheer bulk of irrelevant PhD dissertations in the Humanities that reinforces the status quo by never addressing it – “neo-pagan Marxism in the Andes”, “Japanese court poetry in the 10th Century”, “The Psychology of Clouds” – is a wanted outcome. Money flows to where it cannot hurt the class rule of over-saturated armchair farts over a bureaucracy that has long undermined any relevant, critical intervention. The fact that capitalism has replaced all questions of meaning with itself is nowhere as clear. The soldiers of the current ideology, University Professors, are doing the bidding for system that would otherwise collapse. Frequently, I addressed obvious conflicts of interest with independent scholarship, as when the UBS sponsored a whole research institute several years ago. Yet, when my university introduced Covid certificates in September last year, a line was crossed for me – personally, ethically, professionally. I gave a vocal critique of the University’s segregation policy in class, for which, again (it was the fourth time in not even a year), this time some students were eager to cancel me, on whose behalf I made the intervention in the first place. What was surprising, however, was not the streamlined and hopelessly psy-opped students whose “leftist” leaning was exhausted in raging about “hospitals overflowing with the unvaccinated”. The ultimate letdown, for me, was my colleagues’ compliance. My colleagues, philosophers like myself. People who knew their Kant, Adorno, and Marx. (I feel uncannily reminded of the words of someone at the beginning of the Third Reich, watching the Gleichschaltung der Universitäten and its active implementation by its Kant-reading staff in disgust). The Philosophy Department was the worst. They were actively carrying the torch to the justification of biopolitical totalitarianism. In the sit-down I was forced to have for quoting Bertolt Brecht in class – “when injustice becomes the law, resistance becomes a duty”, the typical words of a Holocaust denier, as was alleged in the smear article the students put forward – I was subjected to the scrutiny of a functionary who made sure that “no lines were crossed” in my class. Again, not the University who implemented a segregationist policy crossed a line, but someone who criticized this policy.
Carrying the torch to whatever authoritarian, harmful, anti-humanist agenda comes their way, is the meaning of the University today. All of this is dressed in the name of “care” – for the “climate”, for “minorities”, for “life”, bare and simple. It is tedious to think that people honestly believe that a class that sees to itself with a suspicious eye for even the most insignificant aberration would have such a grandiose political programme for the emancipation of humanity in mind. But universities do not mirror, they install the disenfranchisement of individual rights and independent thought. Today, you can only apply to The Technical University of Regensburg in Bavaria if you are either a man or a FINTA, a “female, inter human, non-binary, trans, or asexual”. You can no longer simply be a woman. Universities normalise insanity by making insane categorisations prerequisite for applying for a job or filling out a survey. My own University, in the meantime, has installed a chair in “Inclusion and Diversity”, i.e., Race and Gender Scientism. Everywhere, new researchers interested in the “Philosophy of Race”, “Reparations and Historical Injustice” and “Moral Responsibility” pop up like whack-a-moles. There can never be the slightest doubt that research papers like “Contributing to Historical-Structural Injustice via Morally Wrong Acts”[3] will never talk about vaccine injuries after mandated Covid-19 jabs. They will never talk about 10-year olds undergoing irreversible harm because of puberty blockers. University research will make sure that the harms it inflicts on people by promoting its WEF agenda will be attributed to something else. Populism, disinformation, the rise of the “far-right”. This is how you stick to your own and make it look like the interest of all.
In the meantime, a parade of flags – the Ukraine flag aligned with the trans pride flag, the irony of which is not lost on me – billows out in front of the main building of the University of Zurich. Every season is virtue signalling season in this world. It is time to abolish the centres of power. It is time to abolish the University.
[1] https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/book/19516_value-without-fetish-uno-kozos-theory-of-pure-capitalism-in-light-of-marxs-critique-of-political-economy/