The university is not immune to capitalist forces but is another extension of the structure of wage labor and unfreedom. The 1AC has offered an emancipatory vision of the end of capitalism with no vision of the work necessary to overthrow that system. They are an instance of “theory” that never goes beyond its initial research project to actualize their politics.

Approaching Death and Decay In his dedication to Minima Moralia, Adorno introduces his "reflections on a damaged life" (the subtitle to Minima Moralia) by considering what it would mean to "truly carry through," in a way Hegel fails to, the dialectic between "bourgeois society and its fundamental category, the individual" (17). For Adorno, Hegel's failure is the failure of liberalistic thinking: "the individual as such Hegel for the most part considers, naively, as an irreducible datum - just what in his theory of knowledge he decomposes" (17). Adorno, writing during World War II and just afterwards, deems philosophy to be perfectly poised to once more return to the matter of individual experience precisely because the individual is in a period of decay. The very nullity of individual experience makes it ripe for social analysis: Compared to the patriarchal meagerness that characterizes his treatment in Hegel, the individual has gained as much in richness, differentiation and vigour as, on the other hand, the socialization of society has enfeebled and undermined him. In the period of his decay, the individuals experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category. (17-18) The dialectical relationship between individual differentiation and social enfeeblement engenders, in Adornos particular historical moment, an ability to see the individual in a truly dialectical way, such that "part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. If theory lingers there," he concludes, "it is not only with a bad conscience" (18). What I want to take from Adornos aphoristic meditations on decay is a methodological approach, namely the necessity of thinking the university today dialectically, which, in part, entails recognizing the immiseration and nullity of the university, its "being-ill 'mal-etrĄ" , to use Derridas term (87). One shorthand version of this nullity is captured in the celebratory sloganeering by universities and their administrations around the idea of excellence. As Bill Readings argues in The University in Ruins , the "empty idea of excellence" has replaced that of a national culture, the propagation of which formed the mission of the "modern" university as envisioned by Kant and Humboldt (160; passim).8 In the move from culture to excellence, any overarching ideological purpose for the university has been lost. As a result, the content of the knowledge taught or produced within the university is less and less important. For Readings, this shift helps to explain the heyday of leftist theory in the 1970s and 80s: such criticism, as long as it was done excellently, in no way impeded the smooth functioning of institutions dedicated to (nothing more than) excellence (13). This might be one way to qualify Leitch's sanguine view of theory as a "changeling" (127). Does not the vision of theory as multi-tasking and mutating, at once engaged and opportunistic, symptomatic and critical, empty it of any determinate content? Is not going viral, after all, fully in keeping with market logic and its emphasis on dissemination at the expense of any kind of value or content? Readings^ own solution is equally problematic, however. Like Leitch, he essentially does away with any content for the idea of the university when he proposes to replace the empty idea of excellence with what he refers to as "the empty idea of Thought" (Readings 160). In both cases, form trumps content, which is, I would suggest, a sign of the times. Neither of these "solutions" constitutes, properly speaking, a dialectical approach to "ends," as either the end of an idea - be it the idea of theory or of the university - or as the end toward which theory or the university aims. As Adorno s approach to individual experience suggests, renewed attention to the individual is not meant to fortify the boundaries between the individual and the social (thereby resurrecting liberalistic thinking), but rather to see in newly critical ways how profoundly social all individual experience is and hence to sublate the very category of the individual - not in the name of the general but rather of the concrete and particular. For example, in his aphorism "Do Not Knock," Adorno writes that one effect of modern technology is that "the ability is lost [. . .] to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding the interior of the house which receives them" ( Minima Moralia 40). From seemingly insignificant and innocuous movements, gestures, attitudes (cheerfulness or sociability, for example), and types ("the regular guy," "the popular girl" [58]) to the structure of thinking itself, Adorno attempts, as David Held phrases it, "to create conditions through which the social world could once more become visible" ("Adorno" 5). Writing on the "morality of thinking," Adorno underscores that "knowledge can only widen horizons by abiding so insistently with the particular that its isolation is dispelled. [. . .] Dialectical mediation is not a recourse to the more abstract, but a process of resolution of the concrete in itselP ( Minima Moralia 74). Likewise, in the case of the university today, a dialectical approach needs, at all costs, to undermine and unsettle the idea of the university as an autonomous space protected from the larger social world. On the one hand, the conditions of academic labor increasingly mirror those of flex-labor markets, structured as they are to maximize flexibility on the part of administrators, benefit from the pressures of a reserve army of labor armed, in this case, with PhDs, and reward and capitalize on economic competitiveness and scarcity in the form of market differentials, retention awards, superstar salaries, a shrinking supply of jobs, and the exploitation of adjunct faculty. Rising tuition costs, budget cuts, and the privatization of public education limit access to universities and contribute to the widening gap between an elite class and everyone else. On the other hand, changes in university culture have kept pace with these economic transformations: not only is there an increasing divide between administrative and faculty cultures, but most aspects of university life are now assessed through what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge refer to as "the needles eye of exchange value " (33; my translation) - whether in the form of "learning outcomes," quantitative assessments of research, or a course's relevance to acquiring a job. Accountability, as Readings pithily notes, is identified, de facto, with accounting (119). And the list of the ways in which capitalist culture and its logic and practices pervade the university goes on, from the subcontracting of cafeteria, grounds, and cleaning services to building projects, institutes, and endowments financed by private corporations, which threaten academic freedom and make public education beholden to corporate interests. In short, the university as enclave no longer exists, if it ever did.9