Yannick Marshall – The End of Universities: Dissent, Exile, and the Struggle for Intellectual Freedom

IPE Socialist Seminar

This talk traces a personal trajectory — from racialized targeting in high school in Toronto to political exile from a faculty post in Los Angeles — to theorize the collapse of the North American university as a credible site of inquiry and dissent. Corporatized and hostile to Ethnic Studies and non-supplicating racialized voices, the institution revealed its eagerness to capitulate to fascism when leading research universities handed students over to the state for opposing genocide, joining the hunt against their own activists. Research and teaching produced by institutions that so quickly compromise their stated mission for repression cannot be trusted; their findings bend toward flattery of power and the will of authoritarians rather than truth and discovery. From this vantage, the lecture extends the argument of my newly published book, The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon (Bloomsbury, 2025): that Black resistance traditions have been politically neutralized and replaced with performances of supplication, vulnerability, and moral deference in order to be legitimated. If meaningful dissent survives anywhere on campus, it is in the gutters and “undercommons” of the university — with the targeted and undervalued students and professors. As even these spaces are increasingly occupied, the talk asks: where is the next refuge for serious thought, and how might we build or join centers of intellectual life elsewhere?

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