"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''.

Dylan Rodriguez