Zizek on the liberal academic world...

This made me chuckle...

"In 1994, when a new wave of emigration to the United States was in the making, Fidel Castro warned the USA that if they did not stop encouraging Cubans to emigrate, Cuba would no longer prevent them from doing so -- and the Cuban authorities actually carried out this threat a couple of days later, embarrassing the United States with thousands of unwanted newcomers...

[W]ould not the same gesture also throw our radical academics into a panic? Here the old '68 motto "Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!" acquires a new cynical-sinister meaning which, perhaps, reveals its truth: "Let's be realistic: we, the academic Left, want to appear critical, while fully enjoying the privileges the system offers us. So let's bombard the system with impossible demands: we all know that such demands won't be met, so we can be sure that nothing will actually change, and we'll maintain our privileged status quo!"

If you accuse a big corporation of particular financial crimes, you expose yourself to risks that can go even as far as murder attempts; if you ask that same corporation to finance a research project on the link between global capitalism and the emergence of hybrid postcolonial identities, you stand a good chance of getting hundreds of thousands of dollars."