Farewell to the Imperial University

Today was my last day at Columbia University. With my contract up, and my conscience clear, I am proud to say that I will no longer be working for the collaborationists and accommodationists of American academia. I will no longer be giving myself and my labor power over to the imperial university.

Today, I will be striking out on my own, working towards the completion of my next book, teaching classes in prisons, and building alternative infrastructures for the production, circulation, and liberation of knowledge.

Thanks for reading Dr. MGW's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

To borrow a turn of phrase from Lucy Parsons, a leading light of the Black revolutionary tradition and a founding mother of the IWW: “The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.”

Whatever comes next — whatever shape my career may take going forward — I have never been surer of my moral compass, never more confident that my place is elsewhere: not among the elites of a dying empire, who have abdicated their responsibility to humanity and themselves, but among the free peoples of the world, as they take their places in the fight for a future without fascism, and a world without war.

In times of crisis, such as ours, the question of the hour is not simply how to make it in this world, but also how to make another one possible. In 2025, this means we have to learn how to decolonize and decarbonize; how to decarcerate and democratize; how to decommodify and de-Nazify society once and for all. These are but a few of the tasks to which we, the knowledge workers of the world, are called.

With the United States engaged in a multi-front war at home and abroad, and a long, hot summer ahead of us, it is clear we have some work to do.

Just this month, we saw the stunning escalation of military aggression against Iran. At the same time, we witnessed the acceleration of ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Territories.

But we also watched in real time as Los Angeles rose up in response to the ICE invasion; as New York City elected a self-proclaimed socialist; and as protests proliferated nationwide on a scale not seen since 2020.

Recent events have shown us both the depths to which this regime is willing to sink, and the heights to which resistance can rise in the face of the neofascist offensive. They have shown us both the destructive power of the few — the bombs falling over Tehran, the second Naqba now unfolding in Gaza — and the creative power of the many — from the coalition that defended undocumented immigrants from ICE in LA to the one that defeated the political establishment in NYC.

The fires will likely continue to rage, whether in the mountains of Iran or in the streets of LA, fueled by a trillion-dollar war machine and by the manufactured consent on which it depends. By some measures, the powers of the POTUS, the Pentagon, and the police state have never been stronger. And yet the regime’s powers of persuasion — its claims to legitimacy — have never been weaker, and are getting weaker still with every passing day.

The writing is on the wall: this regime’s days are numbered. All around us, as I write this, the contradictions are heightening, the internal conflicts intensifying, the illusions of the age shattering, before our eyes, into a thousand little pieces.

Now is a time for iconoclasts: for those with the courage and the creativity necessary to confront the machinations of the masters of war, to challenge the mechanisms of 21st-century fascism, and to nudge the course of human history in the direction of peace and freedom.

Wishing you and yours a summer to remember, full of resistance and restfulness.

Thanks for reading Dr. MGW's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.