Adrian Lucas <adrian@swix.ch> Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997
Dear Chancellor,
Do you really wish to go down in the history of Chicago as the man of learning who just watched as the bulldozers destroyed the Market Street area ? Are you a white man who secretly is envious that the Blues are the greatest cultural contribution of Chicago, and not Frank L. Wright, and not the Futures Pits, and certainly not the verbose scientific and cultural journals ?
And what for? To build a beautiful temple open to all, or a garden open to all ? No, sir, just another speculative commercial development, a collection of private spaces where some professionals, spoiled with the higher education that is denied to most people, should find ways around the US tax laws, or transfer speculative risks to those who cannot take them, or think up new legalistic arguments for defending wealthy murderers. Or spaces for students to learn how to reduce complexity into neat subject-object abstractions, components for some greater system...
If you as Chancellor no longer believe that the University's duty is towards Public Service firstly, and only secondarily towards profit, then what hope for the lucky students, and what hope for society ? Perhaps, Chancellor, you are one of those scientists who believes that everything is possible, that everything is allowed...
The world is every day moving one step further towards the Radical Evil of Ausschwitz, where the victims were slowly and systematically deprived of their right to die as martyrs. Only this time the invisible hand of the love of profit is creating a global Ausschwitz. As Hannah Arendt has taught us, the Radical Evil of the Nazis was possible, not because of passionate hatred towards the victims, but because the perpetrators were thoughtless executors - Arendt wrote of the Banality of Evil.
Every small gesture towards Mammon is a step away from the temple, away from the garden, towards a global Ausschwitz. We, the self-educated, with our eyes in the sky open, we eat better, and we know what is happening during late-stage capitalism, because we see the corpses.
We are the Sonder-Kommando of the camp. Who are you ? As a man of learning, as a Chancellor, are you not in shame of our society`s love for the profit line of death and drugs ?
Don't give me the wise answers of the lawyer and banker, just open your eyes, sir, you are probably an elderly man, but you still have time and the opportunity to fight again for the ideals that you, deep down, also cherish.
Adrian Lucas
Switzerland
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