Can the tenured speak?
On Ivory Towers
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Dear reader, you’ll have to forgive me but I’ve come to you with more of a rant than an essay.
Despite every ounce of righteous anger that I feel at Minouche Shafik, queen of sellouts, for calling NYPD on her own students, I cannot stop laughing at the tweets attacking Columbia’s professors for not taking a stand in support of their students. “can the tenured speak” by user lint_ax is alone enough to leave me in hysterics. For those who don’t know, Gayatri Spivak is an acclaimed scholar in Columbia’s literature department. She is considered to be one of the leading voices in postcolonial scholarship today and is famous primarily for her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
The piece lies at the foundation of a lot of postcolonial thought and considers the ideological, historical, and economic factors that might prevent someone [a colonized subject] on the periphery from being heard. It’s always been a bit difficult for me to take this essay seriously, partly because it has been overanalyzed and overshared, but mostly because it falls into the trap of a lot of academia: lots of big words to say… not much. The essay truly boils down to just its title, and the answer to the question is yes, the subaltern can speak, the subaltern has been speaking, we have just been choosing to enact violence upon them and render their lands unlivable rather than hear what they have been saying.
But back to point, because in my opinion, Columbia is, indeed, cursed by God.1 I’m saying this as someone who applied early decision to Columbia University and sobbed for days when I got rejected. I’ve never dodged a bigger bullet in my life. Columbia might be the prime example of how Western elite universities are not places for learning and critical thinking so much as they are hedge funds or a front by which to hold swaths of real estate and displace locals. My alma mater, Claremont McKenna College, is guilty of the same.2 My alma mater, though, could not be run by a more classically evil-looking man who often acts entirely like an AI chatbot while making nearly a million dollars a year. Columbia University, on the other hand, is run by an Arab woman. Where’s the solidarity, you might ask, but you’d be wrong to expect anything.
Minouche Shafik and Gayatri Spivak have had incredibly different careers, even though the destination has been the same. Before Columbia, Shafik used to work at other institutions that are also cursed by God: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. An international development icon, if you will. Not everyone who carries out the IMF and World Bank’s predatory colonial agenda necessarily agrees with it, but you better believe that Shafik transcended her humble roots as the daughter of a rich feudal lord to argue that austerity and debt were good for the uppity residents of the Global South. Spivak, on the other hand, has spent her life doing very much the opposite: founding modern postcolonial thought, lecturing on feminism and Marxism, etc etc.
And yet: silence from one during violence from the other. I’m not actually interested in Spivak’s silence, particularly, but I think she is a good case to show how some faculty of color are happy to build their careers on abstract radical theory with no intention of ever putting social or professional capital on the line for these apparent values. And with Shafik, she’s a perfect example of how ridiculous and inane representation politics prove to be. An Arab woman and a Black mayor work together to have a police department known for its brutality arrest hundreds of peaceful student protesters. Please. We cannot be serious about cheering this sort of representation on. Or any, in fact, if it is representation for the sake of representation.
We forget an important question when we focus on only biological identity: can these elites be trusted? And of course, they cannot. Hillary Clinton was never less likely to kill my people and women in my country due to her womanhood. Minouche Shafik was never going to stand with her pro-Palestinian students because of her own Arab identity. The profit incentive is simply too high. Like Rishi Sunak (are these names blending together?), she is happy to sacrifice her people in the name of empire.
Can the tenured speak? Yes, but most of them will choose not to. And it’s not just Spivak. Columbia is home to so many radical theorists I’ve followed: Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman… It gets harder to be brave when you feel that you have a lot to lose. I’m in awe of the students who are sacrificing their housing, health insurance, food security, and education to stand in solidarity with Palestine. Some are international students, who will be kicked out of the country if they’re expelled. I’d like to think I would have been as brave as them a few years ago, but I’m not sure I would have managed it. I go to protests and I donate and I organize, but you will not catch me at smaller disruptions and demonstrations that risk my arrest. I feel that I can’t tempt the universe (and USCIS), with my presence here as tenuous as it is. This may be a fair calculus but I’m aware it’s also a selfish one.
Even as I acknowledge my selfishness, though, I’m not sure I could build a career off cosplaying as radical just to gain proximity to power (and whiteness) and ultimately betray the people I’ve been pretending to support. Embarrassing!
The people with a lot more to lose are the ones putting themselves on the line. The “tenured” actually are protected in some ways by way of their tenure but aren’t speaking up for the students who are being brutalized by the state. Its so unbelievable that it almost feels like a satire brought to life.
Great piece as usual, Laleh. This echoes a lot of sentiments I had back in October, when I saw how truly “liberal” my liberal friends were when they drew a line in the sand and refused to stand up for palestine. This whole thing has shown us who is radical in practice versus who is only radical in theory, who wants to take their decolonial education into the streets and who wants to contain it to the classroom.