The government-installed administration at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas says that, what with the current round of massive state budget cuts, and the threat of future cuts one or two years down the line, they don’t have enough money to teach classes in unpopular majors. (Based on recent decisions from administrative committees, UNLV’s — excellent, but small — Women’s Studies program, among others, might just barely manage to escape the axe. For this round of budget cuts.)

But apparently they do have enough money to build a big memorial to dead government soldiers.

Of course they do; it’s a matter of priorities. When the allocation of money for the University is political, it’s always going to favor what’s politically popular over what’s educationally important. And there’s nothing more politically popular than Patriotically Correct monuments to dead government soldiers.

This is, of course, exactly why UNLV should be liberated entirely from government appointments of administration and from the government strings attached to government funding.

Supporters of the Women’s Studies department, and of academics at UNLV broadly, often view the prospect of privatization of the University with horror. I don’t–because if privatization just means turning UNLV over from governmental ownership to non-gvernmental ownership, that could mean a lot of different things. I understand the reaction, if they are thinking of the kind of legislative privateering where the University simply being sold off to the best-connected corporate bidder. What I think is that the University doesn’t belong to the state government in the first place, and so the state government has no right to sell it to anyone; it belongs to the students and the faculty who use it. And privatizing, or if you prefer socializing it, directly into the hands of the campus community is the only just way to dispose of the University.^[1] It’s also the best thing that could possibly happen to education at UNLV. As long as a government-imposed administration is in charge of UNLV, UNLV will be about serving the priorities of administrators, and serving the priorities of the government. UNLV will be about learning and teaching when it’s controlled by learners and teachers; the sooner we end the government occupation of campus, the better.

NV out of UNLV!

See also:

• GT 2007-11-08: Sprachkritik: Privatization
• GT 2004-06-07: Property to the People: the Leftist Case for Privatization

1. ^[1]Of course, a plan like that — just handing the University for free over to those who work and study in it, with no political strings attached, instead of coming up with some scheme to create a subsidized sale to an bureaucratic efficiency-minded corporate management, with lots of lingering state control over what they can do — is almost certainly something that will never come out of a committee of the state legislature. Or rather, it’s something that will never come out of a legislative committee unless they are forced to it by events on the ground. If it’s going to come about, it’s something much more likely to come about by a strategy of campus organizing, concerted strikes by faculty, staff, and students, and student occupations of buildings and facilities, aimed not at legislative influence in Carson city, but at asserting effective physical and cultural control over the campus. But I see the need for people-power tactics, instead of bureaucratic gamesmanship and legislative lobbying, as an advantage of my proposal. Not a weakness.↩

It’s a beautiful Sunday in May, and Shamelessness is in the air.

I’ve been working away in the scriptorium this week, not as diligently as I like, but diligently enough that some things long-planned are beginning to come to fruition. You probably know that the Bits & Pieces on Free Market Anti-Capitalism are coming out (and will continue to come out over the upcoming week). What you may not know, unless you specially follow it, is that I’ve also been steadily at work over at the Fair Use Repository. In particular, I’m happy to announce that, as I suggested I might last week, I’m now happy to announce that the complete text of the November 1914 issue of Mother Earth is now available online at fair-use.org. In particular, if you haven’t yet, I would recommend taking a look at Guy Aldred’s essay That Economic Army (a reprint from the Spur). The obvious aspect of the essay is a long tirade against the hypocrisies of Labour Party politicians and trades unionists who are long since dead. But whether the polemic entertains you or not, underneath it there is also a really interesting analysis of how the pressure of state capitalism seizes and deforms individual people, and entire industries, into gears for the war machine, through what Aldred calls economic conscription, and how this constructs and confines their interests so as to create a shared interest in perpetuating war. (The question of course is how to become the sand in the gears, instead of the oil.) This next week, I’ll be working some more at Mother Earth and Liberty, and completing the first run of Bits & Pieces (that is, getting through the material that was actually presented at the APEE panel), and hopefully coming back around to some related commentary. Also got a big pile of contact information from the last couple weeks’ A-Cafes that needs to be processed.

That’s my Shamelessness for the week. What about y'all? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.