Abolish the Universities!

The darkest ideologies are born in an academic setting – and that’s

why I’m leaving
ELENA LOUISA LANGE
JUN 23, 2022

35 Share

In recent years, on entering my department building on the way to my o ce at the

end of the hall, I always think I’ve just detected an eerie presence. This nearly always
con rms as correct because some colleague or other usually roams about. Their
presence weighs like a leaden weight on my mind, not because they are particularly
unfriendly or unpleasant, though some of them are, but because I know what they are
thinking about the world and its problems. I know, because they have told me so in
person, on various occasions. I know they think the Covid regime is “doing their
best” in stopping a pandemic. They think that Klaus Schwab whose is a real life
revenant of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sauron if there ever was one and Bill Gates are
“philanthropists”. They also think that critics of the regime are “third positionist
right-wingers”, along all the propagandistic things their government and the German
speaking media wants them to think. They think that saving energy and transferring
their children to a vegan/bug diet (bugs for the proteins) is the right thing to do, and
so they think about supporting Ukraine. But make no mistake. They are no victims.
They are active perpetrators of evil.

I do not make the Klaus Schwab/Sauron-reference in jest. With atomic clock

reliability, the University magazine, the “Journal for Science and Academic Life” is
promoting headlines that read like they were copied from the WEF’s Great Reset
Agenda: “Eating plants. How we will feed ourselves in the future.” (“1. Broccoli
instead of pork cutlets. 2. Weeding, mulching, sowing, harvesting. … 6. Genetically
modi ed corn for everyone!”) Unabashedly, they also talk about Covid 19-vaccine
injuries, except they call them “mysterious Sudden Adult Death Syndrome”, a genetic
disease, in an aptly titled piece called “Cardiac Arrest. Hereditary diseases are o en
involved when younger people die of sudden cardiac death. Genetic analyses can
prevent further su ering in the a ected families.” The audacity, you might think. But
this is part of the agenda.
The University serves the interests of money, its nanciers, the ruling class. It is and
has always been an elite think tank, and the progeny it sprouts are destined state
functionaries. It makes no di erence that the new hegemony of ideas – whether the
identity craze, the newly found belief in authoritarianism statism, the denunciation
of bodily autonomy and free speech – now belong to a caricature Le , and yet the
only Le we have. Any idea that may challenge University ideology (“trans rights are
human rights”, “we stand with Ukraine”) is dégoûtant. The ruling ideas have always
been the ideas of the ruling class. And the Le is now the ruling class. Deal with it.

The reason I was le alone in the 10 years that I worked for the University before
Covid was that I was no threat: I worked on Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and
its Japanese Reception and wrote a book about it that no one (except Peter Green[1])
has read. I deluded myself into thinking that “doing Marx” would be slightly
contrarian, but people everywhere applauded me. I was doing theory that was so
abstract and philosophical (and yet fundamental to understanding our world) that no
one cared. Of course, that changed when I got myself a Twitter account in February
2020. When I started questioning the Covid paradigm and even published a (co-
authored) piece that received attention over social media accounts, went on podcasts
and started this Substack, things became a little crazier at the University. One of the
major letdowns, to begin with, was my department’s handling of the Bratton a air.
Benjamin Bratton, we all know this, is a mentally damaged individual. With biting
aggressiveness, he follows the activities of his critics on Twitter. Without going into
the details too much – listen to this episode of Red Star Radio[2] if you want my take
on his book - he found a Tweet that simply proved Bratton’s blatantly fascist
inclinations (without calling them such). Bratton went for the author (me) by nding
out where I work and writing an email to the Head of Department. I had a sit-down
with the boss. Emails were exchanged. I wrote to the HoD and expressed my
apologies the University had to be dragged into a complaint from an individual who
out of nowhere demanded my resignation because of a Tweet that was entirely
unrelated to my employment at the University. The answer from the Sinology
professor in charge of HoD was that I “had no reason to be sorry”, he “had a very
collegial and friendly exchange with Professor Bratton”, whose concerns were of
course taken seriously. He also did not fail to remind me that my Tweet had “crossed
a line”. This is another emerging pattern in University policing: not the accuser, by
demanding another’s resignation had crossed a line, but a Tweet.

I kept my job, a er all, and my direct boss must be thanked for representing the voice
of reason in this muddled exchange with the design professor from hell. (A er a
while, my boss even informed Mr Bratton that he had made himself liable according
to Swiss law, by aspersing allegations against an individual at their employer. Being
the sorry cunt that he is, Bratton suddenly insisted “it wasn’t all meant that way”.)
It is not as though cancelling attempts were unprecedented at a Swiss University.
Only months earlier, a PhD candidate’s supervisor at the prestigious University St.
Gallen, a professor of Sinology, had declared to drop out of supervising the thesis,
because her student had been critical of Chinese policy in various Tweets. Of course,
the obvious reason was o cially denied. Everyone knew the obvious: the professor
was worried her ties to the Chinese state would be in jeopardy (e.g., denying her visa
etc.). The greatest concern of my department then was a repetition of this “scandal”. I
was informed that the institution’s reputation was to be safeguarded at all costs, and
– in a roundabout way – that employees and colleagues would be thrown under the
bus, if necessary. I was told to “check” my “language on social media.” There was not
the slightest interest in the matter at hand. It was completely circumstantial to
discuss Bratton’s open call to legalise torture and the surveillance state, for example,
in his plea for the “Ethics of Being an Object”. All was deferred to matters of
decorum. As one friend and former colleague of mine put it at the time: “Interesting
to see the University’s priorities shi ing from participating in social debate towards
its technocratic management.”

The University has become a secular version of Hell. It safeguards the transaction of
ideas and “innovations” for the bene t of the political establishment in a never-
ending self-serving circle. The sheer bulk of irrelevant PhD dissertations in the
Humanities that reinforces the status quo by never addressing it – “neo-pagan
Marxism in the Andes”, “Japanese court poetry in the 10th Century”, “The
Psychology of Clouds” – is a wanted outcome. Money ows to where it cannot hurt
the class rule of over-saturated armchair farts over a bureaucracy that has long
undermined any relevant, critical intervention. The fact that capitalism has replaced
all questions of meaning with itself is nowhere as clear. The soldiers of the current
ideology, University Professors, are doing the bidding for system that would
otherwise collapse. Frequently, I addressed obvious con icts of interest with
independent scholarship, as when the UBS sponsored a whole research institute
several years ago. Yet, when my university introduced Covid certi cates in
September last year, a line was crossed for me – personally, ethically, professionally. I
gave a vocal critique of the University’s segregation policy in class, for which, again
(it was the fourth time in not even a year), this time some students were eager to
cancel me, on whose behalf I made the intervention in the rst place. What was
surprising, however, was not the streamlined and hopelessly psy-opped students
whose “le ist” leaning was exhausted in raging about “hospitals over owing with
the unvaccinated”. The ultimate letdown, for me, was my colleagues’ compliance. My
colleagues, philosophers like myself. People who knew their Kant, Adorno, and Marx.
(I feel uncannily reminded of the words of someone at the beginning of the Third
Reich, watching the Gleichschaltung der Universitäten and its active implementation by
its Kant-reading sta in disgust). The Philosophy Department was the worst. They
were actively carrying the torch to the justi cation of biopolitical totalitarianism. In
the sit-down I was forced to have for quoting Bertolt Brecht in class – “when
injustice becomes the law, resistance becomes a duty”, the typical words of a
Holocaust denier, as was alleged in the smear article the students put forward – I
was subjected to the scrutiny of a functionary who made sure that “no lines were
crossed” in my class. Again, not the University who implemented a segregationist
policy crossed a line, but someone who criticized this policy.

Carrying the torch to whatever authoritarian, harmful, anti-humanist agenda comes

their way, is the meaning of the University today. All of this is dressed in the name of
“care” – for the “climate”, for “minorities”, for “life”, bare and simple. It is tedious to
think that people honestly believe that a class that sees to itself with a suspicious eye
for even the most insigni cant aberration would have such a grandiose political
programme for the emancipation of humanity in mind. But universities do not
mirror, they install the disenfranchisement of individual rights and independent
thought. Today, you can only apply to The Technical University of Regensburg in
Bavaria if you are either a man or a FINTA, a “female, inter human, non-binary,
trans, or asexual”. You can no longer simply be a woman. Universities normalise
insanity by making insane categorisations prerequisite for applying for a job or
lling out a survey. My own University, in the meantime, has installed a chair in
“Inclusion and Diversity”, i.e., Race and Gender Scientism. Everywhere, new
researchers interested in the “Philosophy of Race”, “Reparations and Historical
Injustice” and “Moral Responsibility” pop up like whack-a-moles. There can never be
the slightest doubt that research papers like “Contributing to Historical-Structural
Injustice via Morally Wrong Acts”[3] will never talk about vaccine injuries a er
mandated Covid-19 jabs. They will never talk about 10-year olds undergoing
irreversible harm because of puberty blockers. University research will make sure
that the harms it in icts on people by promoting its WEF agenda will be attributed
to something else. Populism, disinformation, the rise of the “far-right”. This is how
you stick to your own and make it look like the interest of all.

In the meantime, a parade of ags – the Ukraine ag aligned with the trans pride
ag, the irony of which is not lost on me – billows out in front of the main building of
the University of Zurich. Every season is virtue signalling season in this world. It is
time to abolish the centres of power. It is time to abolish the University.

[1] https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/book/19516_value-without-fetish-uno-kozos-
theory-of-pure-capitalism-in-light-of-marxs-critique-of-political-economy/

[2]

"The Revenge of the Real" Book Review w/ Elena Lange

Aug 2021 · Marx Engels Institute
Save on Spoti

[3] https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/209327/

35 Likes

Comments
Write a comment...

© 2024 Elena Louisa Lange ∙ Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice

Substack is the home for great writing