Faculty Hypocrites Against ROTC

Look—people can oppose ROTC for whatever goddamn reason they choose. But let’s not pretend that there aren’t some reasons that are (by my very biased reading, at least) completely ridiculous:

We, the undersigned, stand strongly opposed to the introduction of ROTC on Columbia’s campus. In contrast to those who have expressed support for ROTC based on hypothetical conditions, we recognize that any position on ROTC must be grounded in the present. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is official policy and exceptions cannot be negotiated. While the extent of our opposition varies, we all agree that at this time ROTC has no place on our campus.

Gee, didn’t Mahmood Mamdani write an article in the London Review of Books using a hypothetical US invasion of the Sudan to argue against the use of sanctions or UN peacekeepers in Darfur? Didn’t Hamid Dabashi write a hysterical tract in Al Ahram castigating Hilary Clinton for a hypothetical genocide agaisnt Iran? Didn’t Michael Taussig write a book about a metaphorical cocaine museum? And hey, didn’t Elizabeth Povinelli write a book subtitled “Toward a Theory of Intimacy”—as if to suggest that we don’t currently have a theory of intimacy? As if to suggest that such a theory is—dare I say it—hypothetical for the time being?

I’m just getting started. If Dennis Dalton’s belief in institutional fixity were as firm as the idiotic wording of this petition would suggest it to be, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have gone a week without food and spent his evenings in the freezing cold a year ago. Gil Anidjar’s entire scholarly output is about the total lack of fixity in anything and everything. Anyone who went to his talk on close reading last week knows that action and potentiality are pretty muddled for that guy to begin with. I just Googled Nan Rothschild. Her work doesn’t seem “grounded in the past” at all.

My point here isn’t that Darfur/Cocaine museums/Anidjar’s reading of Genesis and ROTC represent analogous situations to which Mamdani et al. are applying an inconsistent standard. It’s that this statement holds some of the more imaginative minds in the university to astoundingly, even nihilistically close-minded logic. Anthropologists and political scientists make careers out of studying the way that cultures change and adapt. Either the ones on this petition think that the military is uniquely monolithic or insulated compared to other institutions and subcultures, or they believe that their blind anti-military bias should be imposed on the rest of us. This is an uncharacteristic brush-off from scholars who usually don’t give anything a brush-off—only it’s too characteristic, considering the self-assuredly anti-military flavor of the ROTC opposition.

No other statement, I think, reveals the stakes of the ROTC survey: vote against this academic anti-intellectualism. Vote pro.