Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

As far as the moral issue goes—I mean, it’s not as if there’s some clean money somewhere. If you’re in a university, you’re on dirty money—you’re on money which is coming from people who are working somewhere, and whose money is being taken away, and is going to support things like universities. Now, there are a lot of ways in which that money can be taken away from those working people and get fed into the universities. One way is by diverting it through taxes and government bureaucracies. Another way is by channeling it through profits—like, some rich benefactor gives it as a gift to the university, meaning he stole it from his workers. And there are all sorts of other ways in which it happens too. But it all comes down to the same point: if you’re at a university, you’re there because there is a social structure which commits a certain amount of “surplus product,” if you want to use a Marxist term, to funding people sitting around in universities.