Well, whaddya know: Antonio Gramsci made the news this week. The Chronicle of Higher Education is the premier “trade journal” of academica, where academics and university workers read about current goings-on. Here, the cultural studies critics Bruce Robbins is rehearsing an argument with the literary critic John Guillory, whose recent book Professing Criticism has spawned a vigorous debate on the role of politics in humanities teaching and writing in higher ed.

As you can see, Robbins invokes Gramsci’s distinction between “organic” and “traditional” intellectuals in order to clarify his objections to Guillory’s argument about the need for scholar/professors to work in a “self-authorizing” and autonomous way, rather than align themselves with political institutions and arguments (e.g., supporting Democratic Socialists of America or righting against the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe). Robbins believes that, although academics have generally been “traditional” intellectuals in Gramsci’s sense, aligned with a “neutral” institution (academia) that serves something “higher” than the partisan pursuits of capitalist accumulation and party politics, since the 60s, many academics have been plausibly “organic” to fundamental social groups.

We’ll talk more about these categories tomorrow, but I thought it was cool to find an unfolding argument in the ether that’s so perfectly targeted to our reading!