Many women and girls, and some men and boys, engage in sex they do not want, desire, welcome, or enjoy for scores of individual or personal reasons. A girl may seek status from her peers, or the attention or affection of a high-status boy; a woman may submit to routinized unwelcome sex because she is dependent upon the man for economic support. A wife may do it because she needs her husband to leave money for the groceries in order to make the kids’ lunches in the morning, or because she wants his protection against other men she may rightly perceive to be dangerous, or because she wants to ward off a vague possibility that eventually he will rape her if she withholds her consent this time. A girlfriend may do it because she wants to avoid her boyfriend’s foul mood should she say no, or because she loves him and doesn’t want to hurt his ego or his feelings, or because she feels duty-bound to provide sex regardless of her own desire by virtue of the prescriptions of her religion. Or—and most complex, and impenetrable—a girl or woman (or a boy or man) may consent to sex she doesn’t want simply because she realizes how badly her partner wants it and she has internalized his desire as some sort of motivating command that should determine her sexual availability. She may consent to sex she doesn’t want or welcome because she thinks he will suffer physical pain if she does not provide him a means of sexual release and she doesn’t want to cause him pain. All of this sex is neither rape nor, in most cases, harassment. Nor, again, in most of these cases, is it even coerced. But it is unwanted and undesired and in many cases, at least, it is also unwelcome.

What we seem to have a hard time recognizing is that while consent works fairly well as the demarcation of the legal from the illegal in the realm of sex—nonconsensual sex is rape, assaultive, and criminal, while consensual sex is none of that—at the same time consent is only a necessary, and clearly not a sufficient condition of good sex, i.e., sex that’s both hedonically and morally good.

This is partly because of the overvaluation, in this consumerist culture, of consent itself as a marker of value, and hence the prime moral determinant of virtually all personal transactions. Consent, after all, demarcates not only rape from legal sex, but also theft from gifts and bargains: nonconsensual takings are thefts, and hence illegal, while consensual transactions—bargains and gifts—are legal. That a commercial or gift exchange is consensual implies that it isn’t theft. But the same reasoning surely doesn’t mean that it is therefore a good, fair, or even mutually beneficial exchange, as the entire consumer movement from the 1950s to the present attests.

Likewise, consent (among other things) demarcates illegal slavery from legal work: if work is consensual, it’s not slavery. But that doesn’t mean the work or labor contract is good: it might be exploitative, dangerous, demeaning, and underpaid. Labor law and labor movements wouldn’t be necessary if consent alone was sufficient to guarantee that our labor contracts are always good.

Sex is parallel in this regard to labor and commerce, but in the sexual realm, our difficulties seeing the harms in the transactions to which we consent seem even more acute. That sex is consensual means only that it’s not rape—it’s not any sort of guarantor that the sex is either morally or hedonically good. Yet, with sex, we only have a vague sense of what the relevant moral constraints might be—beyond the minimal constraint of consent—that might follow from this. We’ve only just begun to put that question on the table. That consensual sex should be welcome by both sides—mutually desired and mutually pleasing, at least in aspiration—might be a good place to start. When women are, eventually, fully included in what my Kantian friend Heidi Li Feldman loves to call “the empire of subjects who are always treated as ends, and never as means,” I believe this will be understood. In fact, when that happens, all of this will likely be too obvious for words. But we’re not there yet.

To this end, Salaita writes, in his book Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom, that

it[’s] more productive to think about academic freedom as an idea constantly in flux, whose practice is not always aligned with its ideals . . . The preservation of academic freedom as a rights-based structure, in other words, shouldn’t be the focus of our work. We should focus on the development and maintenance of just labor conditions and the disengagement of our institutions from the exercise of state violence. Academic freedom is important insofar as it protects our ability to do our work. When it doesn’t offer such protection, then it becomes just another exalted slogan, the type many administrators evoke to conceal the ugly side of university governance.

Conversations about how to increase higher education opportunities for lower income students, especially those designated as “minority” students, are often premised on the very logic that sustains inequality in the first place. So, for instance, there is much talk about how institutions like Harvard might do better in recruiting and graduating more students from lower income brackets. But implicit—well, actually, explicit—in this conversation is the idea that a “quality” education can only be obtained by those students if they go to elite institutions, in systems that effectively replicate the conditions of inequality that serve to keep out the populations they represent. Similarly, in reporting on the feasibility of vocational training versus college educations that, supposedly, don’t benefit students, the general analysis goes something like this: there aren’t enough jobs that require, say, silly stuff like the humanities, with all that useless knowledge about poetry, and they’re coming from institutions that don’t prepare them well for college anyway, so . . . let’s just track them into vocations! STEM!

In this moment, the campus left’s obsession with the far-right forecloses on the facts—that most American universities have already been taken over by neoliberal forces, neither conservative nor left, that see higher learning as a cash cow and the majority of their students and faculty as dispensable in their quest for profits. But the persistence of the left, in insisting that the real problem is that Nazis are threatening to take over campuses, ignores the simple fact that many public institutions like CSU have such enormously depleted student populations that the right won’t even bother with them.

This is a classic con of neoliberalism: it substitutes individual stories and sagas for larger, systemic considerations of the issues at hand. In the case of Radical Academic Discourse, we have only a lot of posturing, and matters are repeatedly framed in terms of “X Professor Who Said Y Faces Retaliation.”

What if we foregrounded movements, not the cult of personality and celebrity? What if we held on to abstract concepts? What if, instead of ceding our ground to Nazis by way of a belief that they threaten control of our bodies and minds, we start thinking about how to open up the university so that it shares its resources—forcibly gathered through land grabs and intellectual property theft from previous centuries—with surrounding neighborhoods? What if, instead of constantly trying to explain stray tweets, we sought to engage in long and complicated conversations about long and complicated matters like genocide as a founding national principle?

If academic institutions are to no longer be like a City on a Hill—or Hogwarts under siege—and if academic discourse is to integrate more fully into a vibrant public life and culture, academics will have to do better than simply casting themselves as heroes of their own sagas. R.A.D. indeed.

WHEN IT COMES TO THEORY, my own reading habits might encompass something as specific as “literary theory,” or “critical theory,” or, perhaps, to make things awkward through excessive specificity, “French theory,” but usually I just say (and think) I like to read theory. “I’m reading theory.” I also think: I am reading this for pleasure and in order to attempt to understand the world. I’m reading this to have better ideas, to be more alert, to—and this part is key—comprehend the invisible machinations of the system—a paranoid thought, but one which I’m not too proud to admit I’ve, more than once, had.

[...] there was a clear demarcation, a dividing line. There was the time before theory, and there was the time after it. In high school, I had read Hannah Arendt; now I read all the names: the two D’s, the two L’s, gentle B, obtuse K, worrisome A, their predecessors H and N, and, above all, F—F with his masterful sentences. Indeed, these names were like swear words, like drugs, like magnetized tokens in a game played by mildly sadistic immortals. This had nothing to do with literature (which I studied). This was where all of the secrets concerning human culture lay. Once I began to read I couldn’t stop, for the simple reason that I had to find out—by which I mean, what had happened.

[...] for Robinson, the humanities are good, but something she refers to as “higher twaddle” or “post-deconstructionism” (another name for the contemporary era, I think) is bad. High-twaddling post-deconstructionism is particularly bad, as Robinson contends, because “we have grave public issues to debate.” I think I almost stood up and cheered with sardonic glee when I first read this.

Robinson is, of course, far from the first to use these late mid-century trends in continental theory to explain why American undergraduates aren’t getting the inexpensive pragmatic educations in the humanities they deserve. Indeed, she’s pretty late to this party. But it is telling to see this notion arise again here, around the question of what is due to an undergraduate who wants to study art rather than, as Sokal wisely framed it, what is due in a peer-reviewed journal. It suggests someone deeply out of touch with the state of contemporary discourse in general and upsettingly in the humanities particularly, in that she has no idea where theory currently makes its living—which is hardly in undergraduate curricula.

To test that theory out, I decided to ask my students at the private college (some seniors) if they knew who Jacques Derrida was.

They, to a person, did not.

The thoughts that have accrued here, about the joys and strangeness of theory, are, therefore, dedicated to them. For they are, as students have always been, the ones who will determine whether academic institutions can contribute anything to the public conversation. This has nothing to do with whether students are “well educated,” meeting standards, or acing tests (or whether they know anything about Derrida, for that matter). Rather, it is about whether they have the tools and material support they need to see connections between their studies and the world, a cliché but not less true for that. Theory clearly continues to play a role in various political and intellectual networks outside the university; perhaps it’s useful for undergrads, too. While I remain a bit agnostic on the “Theory, Ruining Everything or Not?” issue, there are two points on which I am clear: 1., it is a mistake to think that you can replace theory’s strong descriptions of colonialism and late capitalism with vague allusions to said descriptions; and 2., the cost of a B.A. is more distracting and enervating to the citizenry than any form of relativism, narrative or otherwise.

Like the later Junger, Wilson advocates withdrawal from mass society, writing that “culture arises from secession.” Secession is not an uncommon goal in American life today. The coasts show a preference for one kind, anti-government ranchers for another. But nowhere is the idea more politically developed and consequential than among the tech elite in Silicon Valley. At its nexus is computer scientist and tech CEO Curtis Yarvin, better known by his blogging pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin is an architect of antidemocratic, neoreactionary politics and an influence on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Another central figure is Paypal founder Peter Thiel, an investor in Yarvin’s company and high-profile Trump backer. The two are figureheads of the movement rejecting change through electoral politics in favor of “exit” from democracy. One strategy that has received funding by Thiel is “seasteading,” which involves founding autonomous principalities on international waters. The sort of political arrangement that might govern these new societies can be gleaned from Moldbug’s writing. In a philosophy he alternately dubs neocameralism and formalism, Moldbug proposes to replace the decrepit mob rule of democracy with a form of government modeled on the relationship between shareholders and CEOs.

[...] Is it a sign of Boomers’ internal sociopathic confusion that they trumpeted the sacrifice of tens of thousands of soldiers while avoiding participating in the war effort at all costs, even if that meant passing the buck on to poorer, less educated, disproportionately black and brown draftees? Or does it simply highlight the significance of the internal political and social divisions that make it difficult to talk about Boomers in monolithic terms?