Reflections from an Insurgent Postdoc
by an Anonymous Postdoctoral Researcher
Making my way to the research center’s main conference room, I passed the huddled tents of students set up on the College green in front of Van Pelt. Only a few days had passed since the establishment of the Penn encampment. Known as the “student intifada,” the movement swept across the country calling for an end of the US military support for the Palestinian genocide and the Penn’s own complicity in it. I was on my way to a talk about alternative political formations to discuss the ways in which communities were imagining other worlds beyond structural violence and the extractive capitalist state. An unsettling feeling came over me as I walked down Locust, one that is still with me as I write this piece. While at the talk that afternoon, I could not help but think about how we had come to normalize such a scene. If this scene was understood on its own terms its irony would become apparent: here we are holding a talk on alternative futures when brave students were holding their own space for that very reason only a few yards away.
To simultaneously hold these contrasting realities of the Euro-American University leads some of us to develop a double-consciousness. We find ourselves within an institution that centralizes the production of knowledge at the expense of others, operating through exclusion, subjugation, or in the case of Palestinian, Black West Philadelphians, and First-Nations, their elimination. To say that the modern university is an exploitative university is an understatement—it is a colonial institution founded and constructed through land grabs, slavery, ongoing gentrification, and investment in weapons industries.
As conscientious postdocs, staff members, students and the broader community, we live with these contradictions, caught up in the complex web that capitalism’s zero-sum game sets for us all. Reflecting on my time during the 2023-2024 academic year, I realized these contradictions were made even starker by my precarious position as a postdoctoral research fellow.
Before I continue, it is important to note that to hold a position here is a privilege on its own. Many of us feel grateful to hold a postdoc, especially those of us who do not come from privileged backgrounds. At the same time—because nothing exists in a binary—the exploitative nature leads many of us to have these feelings of unease, not least because of our own precarity. A postdoc is a contingent position, dependent upon the output you produce for the institution, a way of making us complicit in the machine. Caught up in this contingency, it is easy for us to lose sight of the setting in which we find ourselves in, especially when some of us have people relying on us back home.
I know what it is like to get here. I can still recall the feeling of opening the email from Penn. After years of submitting dozens of applications, Penn’s offer felt like driftwood in a sea of despair. As a first-generation academic, I was humbled to have been selected and excited for this new position at such a prestigious institution. However, it wouldn’t be long before Penn reminded me that it was but another extractive institution, a liberal folly that masked its violent structure.
Penn’s 2023-2024 academic year, like most other campuses, can be defined by its pre-October 7th and post-October 7th semester. Yet, few campuses in the nation have been as impacted by this date as has the University of Pennsylvania. From former President’s Magill’s decision to step down after relentless pressure, to the lawsuits brought on by Zionists students and the aggressive doxing Palestinians and anti-genocide students were facing, the mask of open expression and progressive politics came undone at Penn. It would not take long for the Penn to crumble under its own weight of contradictions.
As it soon became apparent to me, the circumstances at Penn created a unique campus and institutional atmosphere. Penn operates with a big chip on its shoulder. Interacting with different spaces on campus gave me a sense that the institution as a whole was well aware of its position among the more well-known Ivies. Penn seemed to make up for this by upholding its close ties with the state department and prioritizing its flagship, the Wharton School of Business (whose board called on Magill to resign), and who count the illustrious figures of Elon Musk and Donald Trump as alumni. All of this leads to Penn maintaining a discriminatory reactionary culture to anything that deviates from the status quo as the culture here is to maintain an aura of elitism and conformity.
To work and research at Penn is to not only to have to contend with an institution that is seemingly overcompensating for its position within the Ivy rankings but with the numerous ways it continues to perpetuate displacement, dispossession, and structural violence. The campus itself continues to extend further west, displacing the historically Black population which it has come to rely on as a source for disposable labor force, all the while still holding the remains of MOVE members killed by the 1985 police bombing.
While we often comfort ourselves by saying that these institutions have learned from the past, even believing in their performative declarations, the reality is that these institutions remain actively entrenched within the capitalist war-machine both in Philadelphia, the US and abroad. Take for example the fact that the much-celebrated Pennovations Lab on campus hosts the Ghost Robotics startup, a company that designs autonomous robotic dogs that have been used in war zones including in Gaza and the US-Mexico border.
The Euro-American university relies on liberal doublespeak and polite euphemisms to sidestep direct engagement with their contradictions, including their open support for Zionism. As can be read in the series of emails sent out by interim president Larry Jameson in late April 2024, the neoliberal colonial institution instrumentalizes the discourse of liberalism that professes neutrality while it upholds the status quo. Its so-called politics of respectability are presented as a hypocritical parade of double standards. Behind its façade of impartiality, Penn and institutions like it seek to hide its complicity in displacement and violence against marginalized communities, both materially and intellectually. Moreso, the use of the term “political” as a specific subjective term rather than its broad definition of relationships of power is often used to silence critical positions. This is present throughout the university, even within liberal “allies” who profess to be progressive so long as critical projects do not veer too far off and upset order/power. Here a few examples of how I experienced this instrumentalization during my short time at Penn:
- I asked my center to co-sponsor a roundtable on the history of solidarities between Latin America and Palestine organized with other prestigious universities, I received a curt reply, indicating that the center does not sponsor “political” events
- When I presented a proposal to the Postdoc association to put out a statement of support to uphold academic freedom in light of all the intimidation faced by researchers, faculty and students after Oct 7th, it was received with a similar dismissal. In essence they stated, any response to this would be considered an unprecedented political response.
- Following the encampments on College Green, Interim president Jameson approved the rewriting of the student Code of Conduct to further constrain peaceful protests
The university is indefensible. We, conscientious and critical thinkers, exist as contradictions within it, seeking to make a living as the university counts on our labor to perpetuate its extractive processes. The only way to contend with the double-consciousness of working within this colonial space is to not simply be an ally but to be an accomplice. As the American theorist and poet Fred Moten has remarked, the only appropriate relationship to have with the university is a criminal one. Those of us with a conscience must understand ourselves as insurgents, or as Moten puts it, in but not of the institution, working from within to create tunnels of support for those beyond its walls. We must utilize its resources to advance the causes outside of it, whether materially or intellectually. We must maintain anonymity when needed, appropriate the language of the master in order to advance critical proposals for liberation. To exist otherwise not only leads to our own burnout but lends to our complicity in a colonial and extractive institution.
written Summer 2024
Penn Disorientation Guide 