Yet even while that exhibition was still on view, Zaera-Polo announced that he was resigning from that post. There are long and berating emails to colleagues about meta-topics, such as addressing his “alleged lack of collegiality,” which he writes, at great length, allows him to address “the dark side of conversationalism, which is the code of silence.” In the videos, there are many, many screenshots of interdepartmental emails that contain nuance that will never be intelligible to anyone outside the school. (He notes that three candidates of “exclusively African-American ethnical background” were offered jobs consecutively, constituting “preferential treatment.”) Zaera-Polo also objects at length to his department’s being asked to compile candidates of “exclusively black ethnicity” for a hiring pool.

Those malaises include the institution’s capture by the “financial-informational-media-educational complex that today constitutes the center of American power,” its cancellation of Woodrow Wilson. “The ethnography is aimed to capture an extreme case of the malaises that affect universities in 2021,” he writes in the text. Episode one moves from Nietzsche to Latour and then quickly begins to trash the school’s faculty, starting with Elizabeth Diller, who, in addition to teaching at Princeton, is a principal of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. “I write these lines from the academic epicenter of the culture of cancellation and ‘woke’ thinking, Princeton University,” Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s tale begins, in a document named “The Fascisms of Difference in the Post-truth University.” His text polemic is accompanied by nearly five hours of videos, posted on Vimeo over the last few weeks, called “The Gonzo Ethnography of Academic Authority.” The videos incorporate diagrams and many internal documents, and they are incredible.

It is an extremely pure example of low-stakes-yet-high-drama academic-workplace nightmares. A still from Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s multipart video series.Īn architecture professor said he has been dismissed from Princeton University after a long investigation, and so has published a multimedia polemic mostly about himself but also, he writes, about the downfall of American academia.

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