Today's Inside Higher Ed features an essay offering advice to young academics on how to advance in the American university. I've little doubt that the strategies for seducing administrators, donors, and students' parents proferred by the two anonymous "Administration Courtesans" (assistant professors of English and history) are prudent and effective. But that only makes reading the piece, a perfect display of what Zizek describes as the cynical distance that supports an ideological regime, more disheartening.
Why? Because the basic premise of the piece is that money matters more than anything in America's thoroughly corporatized collegies and universities. The authors acknowledge this fact openly:
We offer several helpful tips for your consideration. But a word to the wise — do not be fooled by the facade of an academic administration. You are entering a corporate world. You need to appear to be of that world, yet also beyond it.
Therefore, in other words, academics must learn to kiss corporate ass and behave like an aspiring salesperson.
Even though the authors namecheck Lacan (in an example of how to drop meaningless jargon to wow some administrator) they obviously fail to grasp a basic Lacanian insight (see his reading of Poe's "The Purloined Letter") concerning the importance of taking appearances seriously, of recognizing that the truth is not concealed in some "beyond" but can be discerned on the surface of things. In short, the Administration Courtesan is lying to herself if she believes that her desired end - "academic freedom" - is not compromised by her kowtowing to the monied interests.
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