Clarissa's Blog

I feel great disgust for the academics who are clamoring in support of Nathan Cofnas’s suspension from Ghent University. Leaving aside all ideological considerations, this is a conflict between a postdoctoral researcher, meaning a contingent low-paid employee, and a massively overpaid top administrator. And you’re going to side with administration? Because an administrator, exactly like the rector of Ghent, is not going to come for your job tomorrow? How facile can you possibly be?

Oh, you’re not entirely in agreement with Cofnas’s theoretical apparatus? You don’t like some joke that he made in some stupid interview? And now is the moment to air that out, just as, by complete coincidence, it strengthens the administrators?

Go get into it with people who have a higher rank than you. Go get into it with those who make several times more money than you. What was all that screeching about punching up, not down?

I have gone to bat for every contingent employee at my department, including the one who was very nasty to me personally when I had no power. Including the one who is sleeping in the office right now because she likes being an absolute pest. Both these people are mega woke but I didn’t use their ideology as an excuse to side with the administration in a self-serving fashion. I made myself toxic to the administration because in a fight between the powerless and the powerful, I will not side with the latter.

By the way, and this is fascinating to me, every single person I have encountered in real life and in online discussions who is standing with the administration and piling on the postdoc is male. All of them use the word “literally” in every comment and accuse everybody who disagrees with them of being Nazis, fascists, and “literal murderers”. They sound like teenage girls on TikTok. And then we wonder why academia is going to the dogs under the leadership of dishonest neoliberal administrators. Academics are no longer even interested in self-governance. They have infantilized themselves and allowed dishonest neoliberal operators to step in and manage them like this sheepish human resource that they are.