The Student-State Functionary-Complex

The Story of my latest Cancellation Attempt, and how Students do the Bidding for the Ruling Class

“Not dealing with arguments”, as I’ve repeatedly learned, has become the template to any kind of ‘political’ interventionism that my workplace’s clientele, university students, make. The über-urban leftist student crowd, woke, and hence politically ignorant to the core, have replaced all interested thought, all debates, all curiosity for challenging ideas with their famous censorship mentality. My recent story playing out at the University is a classic cancel culture one. It has become kind of lame to point out the obvious - that the University is a neoliberal for-profit institution, lecturers and professors are service providers, and students are the customers on the receiving end of a commodity (“education”) that will allow them to become streamlined state functionaries in one way or the other. This also means that the University sees to catering to students in any way they can, and that no employee at the University is safe from allegations or attacks coming from the student side. And yet, students have begun to do the work of the elites: if a lesser employee is somewhat “problematic”, they could be easily bullied out by one wink of the student apparatus - no need to get HR involved too much. The claim that lecturers have "power" should be exposed as the hypocritical crap that it is. We have no power. We must obey the customer. The customer is always right. But it is interesting to note that students have made themselves the useful fools - or tools - for an authoritarianism that could only come to thrive in an elitist urban setting with a high level of inter-class competition.

And so, it came to be that I have been informed that there had been an “inquiry” at the University’s PR department from a student writing for the University’s student magazine: how does the University deal with “unscientific” remarks from its own lecturers made in class, namely [insert my name and institutional affiliation]? And how does it deal with comparisons between Nazi Germany and the Corona regime (an actual term they unwillingly used) made by said lecturer? And Tweets? Does the University tolerate Tweets made by said person in public?

Because some of the issues addressed related to questions of Human Resources law - I was accused of not following “Corona-rules” in class and of giving a 5-minute platform to a student activist group that advocated against vaccination certificates at the University (imagine students persecuting a professor for protecting the students’ rights to freely access education) - I had to undergo a small interrogation with a functionary of the HR department who asked absurd questions such as “how many times did you address Covid policies in class?”. The issue was one specific class I taught on “Culture-Class-Identity”, which began the very day the University introduced vaccination passports on September 15, 2021. On that day, I addressed discrimination policy and asked the students to come forward with their thoughts, as I had with mine - quoting Bertold Brecht’s “When right becomes wrong, resistance becomes a duty.” No one came forward except the students’ rights group. In the next session, a third of the students had left and never came back. There was never a complaint against me in 13 years of teaching at this institution.

HR left me with a warning that my “public addresses” should be in agreement with the University’s policy rules. (Sorry, dear University of Zurich, that’s not gonna happen: I have several keynote lectures and talks coming up in the UK on “Fear, Authoritarianism, and Global Covid-19 policy”, and I’m definitely not going to make a check list if my social analysis fits your agenda).

A young, overly eager student of the media and communication sciences who apparently saw her chance for a career boost (in the student magazine no less) contacted me for an interview on the same day. I agreed to make it, apparently, but in written form and - now that I’d read her initial denunciative “inquiry” to the PR department - on the premise that we would meet upfront for a personal talk in my office, to clear out the legal questions at stake. She agreed, but not without bringing her “co-author”, an equally young and hapless thing who radiated a somewhat fearful aura. I informed them that I would record the conversation - they agreed and did the same. We sat down at my desk in my not-so-spacey office, and I made my concerns about the upcoming hit piece very explicit: were they aware that they would make themselves liable if the article were written in such a way as to make my private statements, protected by the right to free speech, appear as though I had made them in class? (Legally, it would have made no difference, because my statements in class are equally protected by free speech, but there is a reason that, say, my Tweets and this Substack are published under a pseudonym, and not in my function as an employee of the University of Zurich: they are my private views.) The conversation was collegial and friendly, and met its ends. Both girls agreed to keep my private communication, such as Tweets, out of the text, and even promised to send me the article before its publication.

Of course, none of that happened. The next day, the author sent me her interview questions. Behold:

“Your position on the Corona regime in Switzerland is represented by a fringe minority at the University of Zurich. How do you perceive the mood at the university? Do you feel alone with your position?”

“The student association and the majority of students support vaccination mandates and compulsory masking. Why did you give a platform to the association "Students for Fundamental Rights" in your seminar?”

Particularly guileful:

“You write on Twitter that there have already been several attempts to "cancel" you. What happened? Did this happen on the part of the university or in the university milieu? Or in social media?”

My favourite yet:

“Your Tweets deviate from scientifically broadly supported positions. For example, you insinuate that German health minister Lauterbach is lying and call for his resignation. Can you please comment on these Tweets? What are the motives?”

Just to be sure: the proposition that Lauterbach is lying “deviates from scientifically supported positions”. Who questions the German Fauci, questions ScienceTM. I think I’ve heard this one before - I just didn’t think that students would reproduce such nonsense.

(And to be sure, there is not a single statement we have heard from his grotesque clown in the last two years that is not a lie, be it the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, the overflowing of hospitals, the “200-300 dead people” per day, not to speak of his really almost admirable move to present vaccination side effects as “Long Covid”).

I did not comment on the Twitter-related questions and instead expressed my concern and disappointment that the authors of the article obviously chose to ignore the information about legal issues I provided them with. I cc’ed the PR department, and my institution’s Head of Department and concluded that if the article is published with this kind of insinuating and decontextualized framing - the “fringe minority” claim, the claim of “unscientificness”, and the deliberate conflation with my private views on Twitter - I would take legal action.

On which I received a very worried call by the student magazine’s editor. “You can’t really call a lawyer on us”, he said. “Oh yes, I can”, I replied. Well, well. There were some empty promises as to sending me a version of the piece in advance, and the promise that a written counterstatement by my own students who have known me for years would be published, after discussion, online. Meanwhile, my students who, unlike my denunciators, took part in my class from beginning to the end, are more than willing to write a counterstatement to the allegations made against me.

The other day, walking down the staircase at the Institute where I work, I met one of the other students who also took part in my seminar until the end of the semester. He said: “Do you know that there is a conspiracy against you on the part of some students?” he said. Lord, did I know. He told me he was contacted by the editors of the student mag and “outright interrogated”. It was quite unpleasant, he confided in me, especially because they urged him to say something negative about me, when in fact, he only could report on the positive experience he’s had in my course.

“Nazi Comparisons and Bizarre Tweets. A lecturer allegedly made controversial comments about the Corona policy in the seminar. On Twitter she speaks of "Cancel Culture".

was the headline of the perfectly abominable piece whose denunciative tone was only matched by its cringeworthily primitive formulations. It was published in the paper version of the student magazine sent to all Zurich University and ETH students notably on Friday, April 1st. It began with the truly outrageous Brecht quote - poor Brecht is again cancelled by the Stalinists! - and followed by a quote of a note taken by a student directly after class that itself reads like a Gestapo interrogation protocol: “Compares the restrictions on individual freedoms by Corona measures with the totalitarian development in Nazi Germany”. This was predictably followed by a review of my Tweets, the false contention that I “did not allow any criticism of my position”, and the inevitable attention-seeking as to previous alleged “verbal lapses” on Twitter for which fascist creeps like Benjamin Bratton and the local Antifa indeed tried to get me cancelled but failed miserably.

None of the accusers came forward with an argument about what was so problematic about my arguments. In fact, none of my accusers even addressed my argument. None of the state functionaries in-waiting, not even rudimentarily, dealt with my critique of the regime - the Corona regime, as in a verbal slip the authors themselves characterized it. Yet, to expect anything of the kind would be to make a category mistake. 

It must be hard to be a student these days, though. The constant search for an enemy, someone who would not comply to standard opinion or the official Narrative. You have to be constantly on your guard as a student. You have to open your ears wide, pull out your notebook, keep your eyes open. They can be everywhere: professors or lecturers who contradict Mr Lauterbach or Dr Fauci. You have to track them down, catch them, finish them off. It’s a tough one, being a student.

But just with a little luck, in this unjust world of ours, there is a prize to be won. One can imagine becoming a leader. A leader into a future where, by having the correct opinion, all evils are eradicated. And one’s competitors, too.

Cover boy: Peter Gabriel, 1986.