ABSTRACT
In 1940, the Rapp-Coudert Committee was created to track what were then called “subversive activities” and communist influence at public colleges throughout New York State. Public universities have thin membranes; are highly porous to State surveillance and corporate influence, and are intellectual and political carnivals of structural violence and radical possibility. The perverse twisting of public/private deserves a moment of analysis to unpack the weird inversions of corporate logic: what's public and what's private; who is vulnerable and who is innocent. CUNY administrators insisted that as a public university they were obligated to respond in full to the request. Public has been colonized, invaded and penetrated so to speak by corporate interests and the jaws of securitization. The radical edges of the Public University, at moments bold if always controversial, have begun to fray. Public scholarship spins with a doubled thread: radically rooted beyond the academy, and firmly stitched into the neoliberal brand of the “responsive” public university.
