Reflections on the University Workplace, 2024

Now that land acknowledgment is no longer allowed in syllabiI stand in front of my seated students on land not of their ancestorsin a brutalist building built under the rule of a seeminglyimmortal aristocracy.I have worked here twenty-four years.The floor of one elevator is covered with cardboardI imagine there’s nothing underneath it,remember custodial staff who did calisthenics in preparation for night shifts,potlucks at 2 a.m., five or more languages spoken and dancing to musicnever heard on local radio stations.They polished floors with waxuntil the footsteps of a thousand students vanished. Students sit in lounge chairs outside with their feet on Astroturf,the words of Walter Cronkite who, what, when, where, and whyprojected on concrete walls at night. The projector has gone awry, does anybody notice(if only someone would spray graffiti on the blocks)The mansion built by Confederate George Littlefield,whose manservant Nathanial Stokes lived in stables out back,served lunches to recruit graduate students.Now it is home to the Civitas Institute,intellectual explorers of willing servitude,the Ayn Rand Institute summer book club.I play with ideas for self-censorship in my editing class:delete the mention of Soviet editors in the syllabus,exchange exercises that feature the working class for Mad Men,demonstrate how to make a Walmart commercial with state-of-the-art software.The president who called mounted state police to campus during peaceful protests,tells the Texas legislature a minor degree in wealth management serves the public good.His staff emails invitations to Department of Defense classes on how to acquire research funding, a rivalry between Longhorns and Aggies aboutwho can raise the most money for student scholarships.Safe space and gay and colonizer are keywordson a 13,334-item spreadsheet of syllabus and research snippets, hit list already scrubbed clean of words like genocide,messaging that says, “What starts here changes the world.”A bullet guided by misogyny has left its mark on the pedestal that held a statue of Jefferson Davis.Cooks and domestic workers, bricklayers and farmworkerssave and starve to send their children here.The young arrive full of confidence and energyto learn they are not respected, to get ahead is to leave all that is good behind,that only in solidarity they have strength.They and their children will join the unions we hold dearif we fight to sustain them now.Let us not leave this placein self-protection and self-righteousness.Let us stand with those who remainknowing that an injury to one is an injury to all.Let us summon our godsMarx and Gramsci, Tenayuca and Carpenterto this authoritarian place of profit.Let us join a small space of resistancewith unions that reject austerity and obedience.Let us not comply.I have felt the nudge of a police horseon land where I can no longer acknowledge, the origin story of my country is genocide.