Trying to Untangle the Princeton Architecture Department Drama – Curbed

A still from Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s multipart video series. Photo: Alejandro Zaera-Polo/Vimeo An architecture professor said he has been dismissed from Princeton University after a long investigation, and so has published a multimedia polemic mostly about himself but also, he writes, about the downfall of American academia. It is an extremely pure example of low-stakes-yet-high-drama academic-workplace nightmares. “I write these lines from the academic epicenter of the culture of cancellation and ‘woke’ thinking, Princeton University,” Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s tale begins, in a document named “The Fascisms of Difference in the Post-truth University.” His text polemic is accompanied by nearly five hours of videos, posted on Vimeo over the last few weeks, called “The Gonzo Ethnography of Academic Authority.” The videos incorporate diagrams and many internal documents, and they are incredible. Episode one moves from Nietzsche to Latour and then quickly begins to trash the school’s faculty, starting with Elizabeth Diller, who, in addition to teaching at Princeton, is a principal of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. “The ethnography is aimed to capture an extreme case of the malaises that affect universities in 2021,” he writes in the text. Those malaises include the institution’s capture by the “financial-informational-media-educational complex that today constitutes the center…
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