This is the first question and answer from Black Agenda Report’s interview with Dylan Rodriguez, a professor at UC Riverside and the author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. When you’ve got time and energy, read the whole interview!

Roberto Sirvent: You were recently interviewed on the podcast Millennials are Killing Capitalism about counterinsurgency in various corporate and non-profit spaces. The conversation has helped many academics re-think their relationship to the university and the academy, a distinction you emphasized in an interview with BAR last year. Why do you think it’s so hard for academics to hear about their vocation’s predatory, counterinsurgent, and colonial structuring forces?

Dylan Rodriguez: I generally don’t care, or more honestly, i try not to care, about most academics’ feelings. I think academics don’t like being reminded (or maybe being told for the first time) that they are generally, at best, politically irrelevant. At worst, they are actively providing (diversity) cover and training on behalf of an occupying, extractive force—that is, the college and university—that’s a skip and a sneeze away from the actual machinery of violent global racial capitalism and empire. Academics get in their feelings when people suggest they are operating as apologists and, at times, disempowered operatives for an institutional/state liberalism that is central to the antiblack colonial empire war machine.

A peculiar combination of insecurity and political flimsiness is hard-wired into the professional identity of the academic, which often means they are a liability—if not an activated danger—to collective projects that confront the oppressive violence and deadly cynicism of institutions like 21st century universities and colleges. Academics tend to be a menace to most efforts to minimally reform these places, not to mention radically disrupt or dismantle them.

Many of us observed this firsthand during the two-plus years of organizing and mobilizing the Cops Off Campus movement within the statewide University of California system and across North Amerika. Many of the academics—included those tenured and relatively financially secure—who publish, teach, tweet, post, and eagerly broadcast their critiques of state violence and policing were nowhere to be found when it came to supporting what i considered to be a relatively modest, contained attempt to confront the UC police and its long history of repression and profiling. This absence was unsurprising, but no less disappointing and enraging.

Don’t get it twisted: i’m not throwing this criticism out there with some projected threshold of “authentic” participation from these people—i’m saying that the academics i have in mind were wholly absent. Zero. These people know who they are. You know who you are. They ghosted the whole thing and wanted nothing to do with the collective work of confronting police violence on their own campuses. It was their loss, because this period of campus-based organizing and collaboration built and strengthened a continuum of relationships between scholars who were actively exceeding and contributing to the obsolescence of the “academic” position.

The 2022 UC Strike was another moment that exposed a lot of academics as hypocrites, liars, and respectability-seeking bootlickers. Most people reading this probably remember how the strike quickly gained traction in mainstream media as the largest “academic strike” in the history of the United States . Remember, the people on strike were and are workers who not only do most of the teaching, but also the majority of the research in the University of California. The strikers were and are the university, if we momentarily accept the UC mission statement on its own terms of “serving society as a center of higher learning, providing long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering new knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge.”

This was a statewide picket line of almost 50,000 teaching assistants, postdoctoral researchers, graduate student researchers, and instructors across the UC campuses. I physically joined the UC Riverside picket line every day of the strike. I’m not asking for congratulations, i’m saying that’s the fucking least i could do. Out of 850 tenured and tenure-track professors at my employing campus, there were maybe a dozen who consistently joined the picket line. I would say that well less under 50% of the 850 chose to even honor the picket line. While there was a dogged effort by a group of committed UC faculty from around the state to organize support and solidarity for the strike, the vast majority of our colleagues crossed the picket line, undermined the strike demands, and/or cynically used “underrepresented” and “first generation” undergraduate students as their figurative human shields to deflect and disavow the call for a grade strike. (Here i should mention that most undergraduate students i encountered strongly supported the strike as soon as they learned basic information about its context and demands.)

By the way, nothing i am saying in this interview is hypothetical or self-righteous. I understand the limitations and violence of working within the university machinery. I’ve been employed by the University of California for almost twenty-five years—thirty if you count graduate school. I’ve paid my dues playing various roles on the campus and in the academy: i was an ethnic studies department chair for seven years, president of the American Studies Association, served two terms as the faculty-elected chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate, and right now i’m working as the co-director of a humanities center. I have no delusions about the limitations of working within the parochial context of a university, even one that constantly boasts of being the world’s largest public academic institution . I have consistently led and participated in efforts to create spaces and build relationships within these institutions that support people’s capacities to survive and advance, including working with the Underground Scholars Initiative , joining the new Department of Black Study , and organizing activities that redistribute space and resources to people with histories of involvement in radical , revolutionary , and liberationist movements, within and beyond the United States. But these efforts are disruptions—not transformations—of what you correctly identify as the predatory, colonial, counterinsurgent infrastructures of the university.

This is all to say, we should not be surprised when academics respond poorly to the idea that the academy and their employing universities and colleges are engines of oppressive violence and conquest, because most tend to identify with those institutions—or at least not radically disidentify from them.