Coda

Dark academe was briefly televised—and then was quickly cancelled. And just like the Zoomer’s vision of dark academe, it was set on an Ivy League campus where slow-drying tweeds prevailed over dry-fit t-shirts. And while it was not set in Nazi Germany, a professor did make a Nazi salute to his class. The television show offered an illustration of the rotting of the university, and of the “necessity,” as Baudrillard says in the epigraph to this book, “to transform this rotting into a violent process, into violent death, through mockery and defiance.” It was a space where many of the themes developed in this book were streamed during the middle of the pandemic.