“Syria and the Arab ‘Spring’: a Report on Joshua Landis’s Lecture”
Guest Writer: John Claborn

Friday, March 30, 2012

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[On March 29, Joshua Landis (Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma) spoke at a CAS/MillerComm presentation hosted by the Center for South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies in collaboration with the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory. John Claborn (English) a graduate student affiliate of the Unit and recipient of a Unit for Criticism travel grant reports]

"Syria and the Arab 'Spring'"

Written by John Claborn (English)

“Whither Syria?,” the title of this talk, shows us how precarious the situation in Syria is – from day to day, week to week, month to month, we don’t know whether the Assad regime will stand or fall. Of course, most Americans—and perhaps western academics as well—know Syria as a country that borders Iraq and supported insurgents against U. S. forces. Thankfully, Landis’s talk was accessible for those without much knowledge about the Middle East.

Landis’s talk was introduced by Illinois historian Kenneth Cuno, who highlighted Landis’s recent appearances on shows such as Democracy Now! and Charlie Rose. Landis also writes “Syria Comment,” a blog on the topic.

Landis organized his lecture around four problems or questions: why is the Assad regime “doomed”? What are the strengths of the regime? What are the weaknesses of the opposition? What is the economic and regional context for these events?

Giving us some history on the Assad rule, Landis pointed out that minoritarian regimes are not unusual in the Levant (e.g. the Jews in 1940s Palestine, the Christians in Lebanon, the Sunnis in Iraq), but Syria stands as the last minoritarian regime in the region. Though they dominate the current government, Alawite Muslims comprise only 12% of the population, while Sunni Muslims over 70%. The Ba’athist Assad regime maintained power by keeping their sons as military officers, instead of sending them abroad for education. Class also played a role, fueling a dynamic between the rural poor who supported overthrowing the regime and the urban upper class who were made nervous by disruption.

The conflict in Syria, which has left thousands dead, is a reminder still of the so-called Arab Spring of 2010, which saw the fall of regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, with uprisings in Bahrain (violently stamped out by Saudi Arabia). While in the past the opposition to Assad has been scattered, it is becoming more unified and it is gaining more support due to the collapse of the economy.

Most of the questions revolved around U. S. intervention in Syria. We went into Libya under certain circumstances, plus an unstable Syria weakens Iraq. Why doesn’t the U.S. intervene? Perhaps this is because the U. S. sees the conflict as a civil war, but more likely U.S. non-intervention just highlights the inconsistency of foreign policy. Syria, Landis was pointed out, is Russia’s strongest ally in the Middle East—perhaps another reason not to intervene. Read more

John Claborn, "A Road: The End of Solidarity"

Thursday, November 4, 2010

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“The Enduring Human Spirit of Free Enterprise in The Road”

Written by John Jimmy Reader *(Free Market Studies)

*Note: John Jimmy Reader, PhD. in Free Market Studies, lives in an alternate post-apocalyptic world where tenure and institutional loyalty no longer exist at the University of Illinois – and the Tea Party has taken over the UIUC administration.


Drawing on the critical theory of the Tea Party and the Stewarding “Excellence” Team, I see Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as an allegory about the spirit of free enterprise, even when faced with total nuclear annihilation and mass extinction.

End of the world caused by humanity’s intrinsic need to split Hydrogen atoms and manufacture 22,781 weapons of mass destruction.


Radical pacifist who split the atom and then used a wormhole to blow up the world on November 2nd, 2010.



The free market saves the entrepreneurial man and the boy from death, for they are protected from coercion by their employer because of the other employers for whom they can work. They are also protected from a life of existential horror because they can die.




The man and the boy engage in entrepreneurial activity.





The boy is thoughtfully generating more revenue. Killing the man and taking his food is one option, but that might prove a “bold investment.”

In the beginning, the entrepreneurial man and the boy freely decided to enter a business partnership that is mutually profitable and does not compromise their survival with solidarity.




The man and the boy negotiate the terms of their business contract. At this tense moment, negotiations almost fall apart because the man does not like the boy’s idea for an essay assignment, while the boy worries constantly about his $620,000 student loan debt. (note: $620,000 = a certain administrator’s salary)




The man and the boy have settled on a contract, and are now taking a more team-building approach with their stewardy-type management style.
While the entrepreneurial man and the boy work to build private business partnerships, the roving band of cannibalistic thugs (the Tea Party) roam the countryside searching for human flesh.


“Does this flesh have a birth certificate? I won’t eat it unless it produces one.”



The man stumbles upon a Bessemer and uses entrepreneurship to smelt a broad sword. He readies himself for the film’s climactic battle with the cannibalistic thugs, which he wins by using a strategy of sustainable resource stewardship, along with a few trusty Gatling guns and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
At the end of The Road, the Vice Chancellor of Bold Initiatives and the Stewarding “Excellence” Team appear out of nowhere. “There is a perceived lack of entrepreneurial spirit,” the Team chides the man and the boy for prudently surviving hand-to-mouth for decades(RG 13). “We need to make a paradigm shift in the way we conceive and manage our resources. These are certainly times that demand austerity”(RG 10).
“What are you willing to sacrifice?”
The Vice Chancellor of Bold Initiatives
approaches the man and the boy.		 Stewarding “Excellence” Team
lectures the man and the boy about
creating a “culture of scholarly risk and return”(RG 5).

The man and the boy take a course in fiscal ninja arts and learn how to lick the jagged lids clean from all those cans of beans they ate. Guided by the Team, the entrepreneurial man evaluates his human capital (the boy) according to a “notional quantification of the value of [his] inputs and outputs” (RG 24). The Team lectured the entrepreneurial man: “your human capital’s tenure must be held accountable – and by accountable we mean how much cash he makes for this post-apocalyptic institution.”


The man and the boy part ways. The boy got tenure but his program was cancelled due to budget cuts. There just wasn’t enough money so suck it up kid.





And so the boy is dragged off to a laboratory where he is used for a human capital centipede, while the man suits up and enters his $1 million “intellectual excellence pod”(RG 19).
The script for the sequel to The Road, penned by the Stewarding “Excellence” Revenue Generation team, is available here. Find out more about the exciting research the entrepreneurial man will conduct in his intellectual excellence pod!





Promo for The Road 2: “This global campus needs to go interplanetary – and we need to start purifying our own urine!”

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Author’s Roundtable 2: Frank Donoghue,The Last Professors
Guest Writer: John Claborn

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

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Written by John Claborn (English)

Monday night’s (Oct. 26) author’s roundtable and lively discussion with Frank Donoghue proved sometimes bleak and less often hopeful, but consistently provocative. Donoghue began his talk by recounting two formative moments that set a professor of eighteenth-century British literature on the path to writing The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. The first was his move from Stanford University, a financially secure institution insulated from state politics, to Ohio State University, where attacks on “professors who don’t really work” were rampant and budgetary constraints occupied faculty and administrators. This gave him a private/public double perspective on higher education, and it reminds us that he writes with an eye specifically to the problems of public schools like the University of Illinois. The second moment was his reading of such books as Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education and Roger Kimble’s Tenured Radicals in the midst of the then-emergent “culture wars” of the 1990s.

Joining an ever-expanding genre of books on the deplorable state of academic labor in higher education, Donoghue’s The Last Professors dismantles what may be our last comfort: the rhetoric of “crisis” used to characterize the plight of the humanities. “Crisis” suggests that current problems sprang up in the recent past and, therefore, they just may resolve themselves somehow in the near future. Instead, Donoghue reframes this crisis as “an ongoing set of problems” (1) in a “long dialectic between business and higher education” traceable back to the nineteenth century (23). Humanists, he shows, are still simply rehearsing the same debates put forth by Matthew Arnold and Andrew Carnegie in the Victorian era—debates about the usefulness of people who study and teach literature to corporate America’s bottom line. As history has shown, Carnegie’s utilitarian ideals of productivity and efficiency have proven more powerful than humanist ideals (though to be fair to Carnegie, he aspired to be a “man of letters”). By mapping a genealogy of corporate vs. humanities discourse within higher education, Donoghue challenges us to reformulate the debate’s key terms and move beyond the “rhetorical rut” of Arnoldian defenses of humanities education.

Donoghue then moved on to a critique of the “publish or perish” tenure system and academic freedom. He argued that the increased emphasis in recent decades on publication for determining tenure has lead to a “scholarly publishing industry” that places enormous pressure on upcoming generations of scholars. Productivity measured in terms of articles and books is symptomatic of corporate values, even though only about 2% of these “commodities” are ever cited. To conclude, Donoghue summarized arguments advanced in his new article, “Why Academic Freedom Doesn’t Matter,” in which he traces the history of how the principle of academic freedom became linked to the tenure system.

Each of the responses from Dave Morris, Antoinette Burton, and Dianne Harris, as well as the ensuing discussion, centered on current, concrete struggles within the university. Many good questions were raised: how can we find ways to critique corporate values without reverting back to empty arguments for the intrinsic good of critical thinking? What is the value of scholarly work when it rarely reaches a non-specialist audience and when it is viewed primarily as a means to obtaining tenure? What kinds of leadership exist, or should exist, to organize both full-time faculty and the exploited adjunct multitude into coalitions capable of combating regressive administrative policies? How do we make local coalitions formed around local problems more national (and international) in scope that can effectively address larger systemic problems affecting, say, Ohio State University, the University of California, and the University of Illinois?

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