Firstly, regarding the extremely impressive ongoing protests and occupations at American universities,

why do you think there has been this extraordinarily quick move to extreme repression

and the calling in of the police by university administrators?

I think there are a number of things intersecting here.

I mean, first of all, there's the university bosses in the US who aren't necessarily academics.

I mean, take Columbia.

Everybody's seen the footage now of Manus Shafik, president of Colombia.

What is she?

She's a former Bank of England, World Bank, and IMF Bod. I mean, she's a representative of the

executive of the capital's class. And people like her are appointed to run universities, not because

they're academics, but because they'll run them like businesses. That's what she did at the LSE,

which is my alma mater. Luckily, I got out before she came in, but under her

directorship, it became a band-garde of casualization strike-breaking in the UK. Her predecessor,

Craig Calhoun, wasn't amazing or anything, but at least he felt occasionally that he should

listen to staff and students. And if you think about the reforms to universities in the UK,

intended, obviously, to make them a lot more like those in the US.

They treat students as consumers rather than citizens.

Now, there's a certain authoritarian logic there

because you do not engage consumers in your restaurant or whatever

as political interlocutors in the way that you do citizens,

if they misbehave, you call the cops and you have them ejected.

That's the logic that has been rolled out here.

...