minouche shafik

I once listened to a colleague rail against the million-dollar salaries paid to some university presidents and chancellors. As he saw it, such salaries were grossly wasteful; it would be possible, he argued, to find people willing and able to do the same work, just as well, for far less pay. He was right, of course. But the point of those high salaries, I said, is not really to attract rare talent. The point is to create class identification with business elites and wealthy donors, and to ensure complicity with their desires.

University administrators whose allegiance is bought in this way constitute a comprador class. A “comprador,” in political theory, is a member of a colonized group who abets the colonizer, against the interests of his or her own people, in exchange for wealth, privilege, and local power. We are now seeing this comprador class in action, as its members—the presidents of Columbia, NYU, Yale, and other universities—serve ruling-class interests by trying to quash student protests aimed at stopping the genocide underway in Gaza.