Tournament: Blake | Round: 1 | Opponent: Homewood Flossmore TS | Judge: Jim Broomfield

The university has transitioned into nothing but a skeleton of power. Deprived of knowledge, the university is a rotting carcass of education upon which democratic meaning is constantly reinjected to make up for the total lack of meaningful discourse. The only other option is to turn this rotting into a violent implosion, onto which we can inflict real harm.

Baudrillard, 81(“Simulacra and Simulation” P.149-152—Jean Baudrillard was professor of sociology at the University of Paris, widely regarded as one of the most significant contemporary thinkers and cultural theorists, has written and published multiple philosophy books)ED
The university is in ruins: nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and employment,
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rules the social order, behind which grows the absent, illegible, terror of control, the terror of a definitive code, of which we are the minuscule terminals.

My opponent’s liberal quest for speech on public campuses actively reproduces the university as an empty institution of democratic violence. Because the university valorizes all forms of speech and critical thinking, change through this rhetoric is impossible and actively contributes to its structure of power.

Baudrillard, 81(“Simulacra and Simulation” P.155-157—Jean Baudrillard was professor of sociology at the University of Paris, widely regarded as one of the most significant contemporary thinkers and cultural theorists, has written and published multiple philosophy books)ED
A strike has exactly the opposite effect. It regenerates the ideal of a possible university: the
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teacher, equivocal complicity on the part of the student - it is based on this phantom scenario of pedagogy that things continue and this time can last indefinitely. 

The university is the cemetery of social expression: the mass grave of Western culture. The university’s exclusion of death from the social and its valorization of all things it perceives as socially alive is ironically the thing that engenders the death of all sociality.

Anonymous UC Berkeley Student, 10(“The University, Social Death, and the Inside Joke,” http://anarchistnews.org/content/university-social-death-and-inside-joke)
Universities may serve as progressive sites of inquiry in some cases, yet this does not detract
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and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything.56

The alternative is an affirmation of objecthood to cause the symbolic collapse of the university. The university’s current logic is to maximize speech and critical thinking in order to simulate the existence of a democracy of knowledge; thus, the only possible resistance is the rejection of speech.

 
Baudrillard, 81(“Simulacra and Simulation” P.84-86—Jean Baudrillard was professor of sociology at the University of Paris, widely regarded as one of the most significant contemporary thinkers and cultural theorists, has written and published multiple philosophy books)ED
With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind –
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is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.