from Radical Education Department
(Flynn and Dave’s article was originally published in Forum.)
RED’s Introduction to “The Koch Brothers at Villanova”
The article that follows was recently published in the Villanova student magazine Forum. It uncovers the hidden influence exerted by the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers on Villanova University’s campus. The Matthew J Ryan Center, Flynn and Dave show, receives large sums of money from the Kochs precisely in order to serve as their puppet in peddling neoliberal indoctrination under the disguise of the academic pursuit of
knowledge.
RED has a particular interest in the Koch’s secret influence at Villanova, since our group first banded together–under the name “Nova Resistance”–to disrupt a Ryan Center event. In early 2017, the center hosted a talk by the widely disgraced pseudo-intellectual Charles Murray, who became infamous in the 1990s for openly embracing the eugenicist view that workers, women, and people of color are genetically inferior to rich, white men. The event was billed as an expression of Villanova’s deep commitment to academic “free speech”–a ridiculous claim, given that the talk was secretly purchased by billionaires spreading an agenda that does not stand up to academic scrutiny, on a campus that refused to allow the “free speech” of an openly gay performance artist on campus. Moreover, it came to light that the university paid between $10,000 and $15,000 for additional “security” from the local police department out of fear that activists would exercise their purportedly constitutional right to protest the Charles Murray event. For more on our disruption of this corporate bank-rolled, over-securitized, pseudo-intellectual spiel, see this official statement.
Dave and Flynn’s article highlights a problem that goes far beyond Villanova University, however. Corporate and military interests regularly shape academic life on college campuses, in what some aptly call the military-industrial-academic complex. See, for instance, this article and this piece. The university system is not set apart from the forces of social domination that structure our society. It is neither a pure “ivory tower,” nor simply a harmless public service aimed at helping students find jobs. It is a site of social struggle. In it, reactionaries seek to advance, by any means necessary, an agenda of social domination. But history repeatedly shows the university can also be a means to infect society with radical, liberating social change.
The aim of the Left should not just be to protest corporate and military interests on university campuses. Such a reaction is defensive; it fails to make a lasting change, leaving the university at the mercy of reactionaries. Instead, the goal must be nothing short of a radical offensive: transforming universities into spaces from which to spread radical social change. This is precisely one of the reasons why we founded RED in the wake of our disruption of the smooth functioning of the military-industrial-academic complex at Villanova University.
– RED
