At a church in Oakland last December, theorist and poet Fred Moten engaged in a freewheeling conversation with historian Robin D.G. Kelley about Black Power, militant resistance, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Moten had less than kind things to say about political organizers and professional poets, and even harsher things to say about the contemporary American university; during the Q&A session, when an audience member asked about the decline of American higher education, Moten suggested that the university wasn’t worth saving. He traversed similar territory in his influential book The Undercommons, co-authored with Stefano Harney, in which they wrote: “The only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one.” (A long excerpt from the book appeared in e-flux journal in March 2010.)
Here’s a video of the full conversation between Moten and Kelley: