Week 5: Micah Sakado A02

We have been talking about the University and its faults all quarter and looking at The Imperial University: Race, War and the Nation-State by Piya Chatterjee and Professor Maira further takes apart the university system and further examines the ways in which this institution imposes its agenda (along with America's) on students and faculty. The university takes on US ideas about imperialism not in relation to land mass gained, but in terms of what it values: power, subjugation, and control of mass groups of people. It took me a while to understand what the Imperial University because I have never heard it before. I always associated imperialism with western countries conquering foreign lands. In fact, world history courses taught me that imperialism was not necessarily a bad thing since it lead to the development of many great nations. Sure, this is true, but it ignores the mass destruction that imperialism has lead to. Bringing this metaphor to our context, the university's imperialist ideals have done great harm to faculty and the student body alike. The article says that within the Imperial University, there are always fronts of war that exist within. These fronts are imperial cartographies, academic containment, manifest knowledge, and heresies and freedoms. I will not go into each of these in detail, but they all deal with inherent truths and hegemony. The university has a set agenda and it expects its student body and faculty to adhere to it (or if they disagree, to shut up). If they don't, they will destroyed. One thing I would like to point out is this idea of "Academic Freedom". I find this particularly interesting because although it is advertised as this liberating aspect of academia, the university uses it to shut down potential opponents in the most ironic fashion. Okay, by this point I totally understand the argument against the university, but my question is how come people are not aware of these fronts of imperial battlegrounds? Is the university just that powerful that it repress any criticism against it?

Feldman, Brian. (2016, April 15) UC Davis Tries to Scrub Pepper-Spray Incident From Web, Which Means It’s Now the First Result on Google. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/uc-davis-tried-to-hide-pepper-spray-incident.html

The University says what it wants and censors what it doesn't.