What does free speech mean on a college campus? On the one hand, universities purported to be beacons of liberal free inquiry and independent scholarship, where faculty have job security and protections that allow them to say what they want. On the other hand, universities have long sought to limit the kinds of speech espoused by both students and non-faculty workers. Want to write your own syllabus or mine the archives of the Byzantine Era? Go ahead. Want to protest racial inequalities and foreign wars, join radical organizations, or form labor unions? Well, then you might have some problems. The very rights that protect speech in the public sphere also protect private institutions’—universities included—right to limit speech. In a wide-ranging essay-review for Books & the Arts on the politics of campus speech, Bruce Robbins examines the contradictions of speech on university campuses and how administrators waved the banner of liberal rights during the Trump years but called in cops to brutally suppress students exercising those rights to protest the war in Gaza. The hard fact, he concludes, is that “university administrations are not constrained by the law.” At times they can allow speech, even protest, on campuses, and in other instances they can invoke arbitrary “time, place, and manner restrictions” to restrict it. Read “The Politics of Speech on the American Campus”
Industry’s creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both former bankers, have spent much of the HBO show’s three seasons delineating the mercenary sensibility needed to succeed in high finance. Despite all the drama of the characters’ personal lives—they sleep with each other, do drugs together, manipulate and lie to one another—the show’s premise is quite simple. “The soapy operatics,” Vikram Murthi writes in his review, serve a straightforward “critique of capital”: that the world of high finance is a war of all against all. This critique at times can be cartoonish in its excesses: Everyone becomes a Machiavelli, as friends and lovers betray one another in desperate pursuit of profits and material advancement. And yet, Murthi notes, it reveals something more subtle as well: that even while everyone is making lots of money and doing a lot of partying, no one appears to be having much fun—not even the show’s viewers. “Industry’s hardly the first series to document the cutthroat excesses of the business world—forebears like Mad Men used similar ingredients potently. But there’s often a spark missing from the proceedings that keeps Industry from greatness. Maybe it’s because the dialogue isn’t funny enough, or because the general self-destruction doesn’t cut deeply enough to be fully tragic.” Even when it is entertaining, Industry ultimately tends to reveal how little exists beneath the surface: how the “moral race to the bottom” can also quickly become “monotonous.” Read ““Industry”’s Gleeful Critique of Capital”
