From a University Employee to a Petit Bourgeois Intellectual

Abstract

In our role as entrepreneurial intellectuals, the entire university bureaucracy was arrayed against us, so it was inevitable that the cold icy darkness of the iron cage would one day descend upon us and close the bureaucratic door on our entrepreneurial activity. Consequently, we established a limited liability company in 2006. The book concludes by arguing that the strategy of the entrepreneurial intellectual creates multiple centers of decentralized power that generate alternative institutions and forms of behavior, alternative norms of intellectualism, and competing modes of legitimation that erode the boundaries of the corporate university at its edges, while carving out entrepreneurial spaces within its interior. It organizes intellectuals in small guerilla bands, rather than as a class or collectivity, and for the foreseeable future, this may be all that is possible—but at least it is possible—and it does not require a massive social movement to initiate this strategy at a particular university or at universities everywhere.

In cases in which production requires great division

of labor, and a considerable collective force, it is

necessary to form an ASSOCIATION among the

workers in this industry; because without that they

would remain related as subordinates and superiors

and there would ensue two industrial castes of

masters and wage-workers, which is repugnant to

a free and democratic society.

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General

Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century