Higher Education @ MindSay

Or "sickdussion," I think.

Inside Higher Education is a peculiar forum for worldwide hemming and hawing about intra-departmental politics. Cyber-anthropologists may one day study it and create the type "academicus patheticus: soon-to-be tenured professor convinced of his or her failure(s)."

The linked article performs nearly all of the process of academic self-evaluation: 1) oh, I'm in over my head; 2) oh, I'm doing pretty well; 3) oh, those people don't do it right; 4) oh, I'm not being noticed!; 5) oh, I've had it here!; 6) it's gonna be so much better someplace else, with a new job!

In fact, here's my way of defining what it's like to work in the academic world: "academic (noun): one caught in an endless loop of self-evaluation."

there's long been something confining about education.

the classrooms smell sickly like hospital rooms, with the same white cinder block walls and jaundiced yellow lighting, and the wheeze of projectors, or the stagnant compacency of the teachers and the taught, and the thickness in the air of people confined together where they don't want to be.  the teachers hand out fliers with blanks to fill in, and we fill in those blanks, knowing each one simply fills a minute, and the taught are disinterested in what is being said even if the teachers believe in it, and if the students are interested, the teachers are not.  and even in the case where both are interested, the awkward saddling of grades onto ideas forces obstacles in the path to insight.

i have long thought education was choking in many of those ways, like netting a wild bird.  but then i think, how else would you see the wild bird up close, and see the sheen of its vermilion feathers?

i am conflicted on the subject, although i mostly dislike the education system for its smothering quality, and its way of discouraging kids with its forced confinement and stale repetition, and its social stratifying pounded into our heads, based either on supposed intelligence, pure appearance, or what have you.  mostly, schools, in their most base quality, oppose impulse and intuition, which i think are keys to insight.  but then i think however, how can else can you learn to interpret the technicolored flashings on your retinas than some exposure to long-established thoughts, to provide foundation from which to fling your own thoughts?

what are schools?  places of learning, of deep thought, of nursing ideologies on the breast of a thinktank institution?  these are all grand euphemisms of the rudimentary purpose of a school or even the more grandiose notion of a university.

when it comes down to it, schools socialize young people into a productive post in society.  that is their fundamental purpose, and no higher ideal than that, no ideal of stirring great sparks to kindle the mind.  as well as i said, they introduce the frames of thought, as foundations, a base or starting point on which to build our own alabaster tower, or that is what we like to believe. in actuality, because we must use the very ancient stones from which they laid their foundation, whatever thought-house we build, mansion, cottage, cabin, or shanty, will contain a cornerstone of their thought.  our own stones will not go beyond their parameters.

this is really not a new idea in itself, but the utter bluntness of it struck me--that a school is really not a place of higher enlightenment, but instead, taken at face value, a factory churning out skilled laborers made specifically for demand.  and especially the ruse under which we all conduct ourselves--that we are out to achieve some higher purpose of learning, of intellectual achievement--i can see it transparentally in my educated friends discussing Nietzsche.  Here are more buzzwords: bourgeoise, juxtaposition, the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, economy.  and we have the nerve to call ourselves intellectuals, and worse: artists.

look at any artist and you will see that art is antithesis of productivity...for all art is useless and beautiful, and has done nothing to contribute to any sort of mass production to feed the constant uptake of society.  and so art, must, in part, be in opposition to the institutions who serve production.

it is odd because we all think of art as essentially creative; when we meet someone who draws or plays music we call them creative, but in fact creating and producing are not synonymous, though it would seem.  creating has nothing to do with replicable results and, thus, operates on the instance of impulse.  the purpose of creating is not in fact even to produce a material object made from the force of creativity, though it may be so.  the purpose of every creation is insight, one single, often irretrievable instant of counter-productive thought, not rolled along in the assembly line of taught channels of analyses, hypotheses, theorems, or logistics.  art is  the moment where we halt at attention, essentially the counter-productive, while wholly creative and original in that originates some new thought for the sake of its own delicate existence and no other.  all else is productive: out to reap the tangible fruits or manufacture some object not for the sake of itself but for the sake of how it will be used for something else, on some never-ending chain link stretching upwards from used to user become the used, and no other.

and yet within the designated parameters there is the illusory idea of counterproductivity.  this is why universities are controversial, accused of fostering ideologies or weak intellectuals--fostering not productivity, but teachers who, after finished with a lecture, gaze out a nature, or students who, also subsequently finished with lecture, go out and get drunk.  this is only partially true about teachers and students, but that is besides the point: the point is that the very reason a teacher can even gaze at the wonders of azure skies or a student can drink himself to death is because somewhere we have produced more than we can consume--that is, they do not need to be directly productive.  this allows the illustrious institution of the university the power of claiming counterproductivity and taking up the banner of counterculture.  just because a university is more like a cog in a gear of production rather than the pistons does not mean it is any less involved in the process of production.  it is only a less obvious piece.

universities are breeding-grounds for activism, but it is contained activism.  because of the ideal of deep, even original thought sparked in their heads, college youth march down the channel of counterproductivity, often on the claim of higher purpose.  "i have better things to do than school.  i can save darfur!  i can prevent global warming!"  this idea of becoming an opposing force to production, while remaining part of an institution wholly established for the training and fitting of individuals into productive roles in society, can never work.  universities provide a comfortable and self-satisfying environment for contained activism and intellectual self-gratification, continuing the ruse of insightful, counterproductive thinking, confirming their own beliefs in their high intellect, and "making a difference," which breeds the herds of roaming and trampling pseudo-intellectuals with blaring, nasal mating calls of jazz theory, gender issues, ethnic relations, and moral philosophy scouring the quads.

however, the reason i am conflicted about education is this: the only way i can see to truly act counterproductively is, in fact, to use the productive system against itself.  one can never "destroy" the system, as anarchists would believe--that is too simplistic and idealistic, equally simplistic as continuing perfectly and blissfully unawares  into your role in the production system.  punks are only another designated role that people have set out as supposed fringes of society, but in fact are integral for the impresion of the very fringe itself. the same goes for bohemians, who are only another face of designated counterculture--although closer to acting upon impulse and fostering art, the bohemian ideal of easy love has been shattered time and time again, and they operated to heavily upon ideals, not upon actions. society is as stable as ever--stratification has existed and will exist forever, french revolution, egalite, liberte, and fraternite aside, not to mention another buzzword: Marxism. 

the only thing we can do, as i said, is continue in the system, and indeed find your niche, and carve your own hole in it.  as emily dickinson did, act with chastity and disguise the contumely in white, allow yourself to be taken care of because "you are a woman," and "a child," then use the time you now have, in place of taking care of yourself by engaging in productivity to instead engage in creativity.  exploit what is expected of you, act meekly and obediently, but surge underneath.  create when no one is looking, because we do not create for the use of eyes, only for its own existence as remnants of ourselves.  produce when people are looking, or when expected.  act as jesus did, meek and humble and a lamb, appear as a baby and rise, secretly, and without anyone really believing, as a holy spirit, both begetter and begotten, God-king, for all who create are gods to their creation and to themselves, and no university will prepare you for that kind of autonomy.

and do as i have done, use the very tools of self-satisfying intellect: vocabulary and analysis, to prove these modus operandi in fact weapons to their very ends, and where you tread in intellectually masturbatory grounds, use the gratifying stimulation of ideas for exposure, for windows into how to get out. act as mahatma, king, and jesus christ would have:  lower yourself out of your niche. do not fight, do not rise up.