College Is an Education in Bullshit
The value of universities is in revealing how they themselves suck.
The nicest thing that can be said about college as an institution is that it gives the kids able to afford it an appropriately sheltered place to live out their prime criminal years in an environment where they will not be as harshly prosecuted for their various youthful hijinks as they would be if they were not in college. The not nice thing that can be said about college as an institution—at least as it exists in America—is that it is one of the most distilled expressions of the rot at the heart of how this country chooses to function: Take a public good (higher education), have Republicans choke its public financing, privatize it, make the ability of people to have a decent life dependent upon buying it, and then “run it like a business,” in the sense of creating lavish tiers for very rich customers and inflating prices to extortionate levels and attacking labor and climbing happily into bed with some of the most sociopathic billionaires the world has ever produced.
While there are legitimately important stories to be told about elite colleges and universities—in particular their sly inclusion in the class war in the form of the adjunctification of their faculty and the way that they function to groom a superficially diverse cast of young people for their roles as the next generation of class war overseers at McKinsey and Wall Street and the halls of politics—those are not the stories that most cultural commentators like to tell about them. Instead we get an obsessive and frankly bizarre focus on the rhetorical and political and fashion choices of a bunch of 20 year olds, who are held up as the collective Children of Omelas that all of society can come together to crucify so that sad adults can feel better about themselves. This weird tic, which pervades the media like an infectious disease, means that college does serve one more useful function: If you listen to people talk about it you can very quickly tell who is not worth listening to at all.
It is very easy to be annoyed by college kids. After all, they are young and healthy and have their whole lives ahead of them and the rest of us have already chosen our dreary paths, which we regret. Arithmetic tells you that college students have not had as many years to learn things as older people have had, and sometimes they act with the brashness and overconfidence of youth. This is a trivial observation about the nature of the human lifespan. It is not a weighty subject for political commentary. To the extent that any writer or politician or intellectual treats it as a matter that rises to the level of public importance, or, more absurdly, that reflects some new sociological trend that has not been present for the past several thousand years, the commentator in question is at best a fool and at worst a fraud. If you were to take the five hundred members of the US media who talk about college campuses the most and cast them all into the sea, the overall quality of our national discourse would rise significantly, because at least it would contain a lower amount of pure, goading distraction.
College campuses are little bubbles that exist outside of “the real world.” That is, of course, how they are designed. Getting mad at college kids for this fact, in the form of criticizing them for being sheltered, is sort of an upscale version of getting mad at prison inmates for being in prison. We put them there! That’s where they they are! What else are they supposed to do? Political protests on college campuses are set pieces, yes, but that is a very deliberate result that was engineered not by college students but by their institutions. To whatever extent college kids are able to break out of the comfortable trap of “campus activism” and connect their protests to the wider world, I salute them. As should we all.
Seen from this perspective, the protest encampments in support of Gaza that are sweeping elite college campuses across the nation—and being ruthlessly crushed by riot cops at the same rate—are valuable arenas of political education, more valuable than anything those kids will learn in the classroom. These experiences will teach these kids some of the most important truths they will need to know to accurately assess the way that America operates: That the polished people in charge of things are often merciless dictators at heart; That awful atrocities will be tolerated as soon as they can be ignored; That one millimeter beneath the smile of the boss lurks gritted teeth and a determination to call the cops to break your head open if you don’t listen. To have young people set out to protest the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and then be met by hysterical repression from the same institutions that have been tasked with making them “good citizens” is one of the best lessons I can imagine. It is an act of wiping off the makeup to reveal the pig beneath. We wouldn’t want that pig to be concealed forever, would we?
Just as important as the tear gas and the billy clubs and the administrations cancelling their graduation ceremonies are the words of those condemning the college kids for doing all of this. All of those words—from the somber cable news hosts pretending to fret about chaos, from the insincere lobbyists trying to smear human rights as antisemitism, from the once-friendly politicians afraid to embrace obvious moral judgments due to the naked demands of empire, from the university administrators who turn from gentle friends to militant gremlins when the invisible line into actual disruption is crossed—reveal the contours of the bullshit that envelops all of this. We send kids to college to learn, but not to understand; to become independent, but not independent minded; to become responsible, as long as that sense of responsibility does not extend to everyone else in the world. Sometimes, something so bad happens that it causes an uprising that breaks the whole facade. Vietnam was that for my parents’ generation, and Gaza is that now, and there will be other things to come. The people who think that this is all wrong just show that they never really understood what education is in the first place.
Education is vital. College is dumb. A fabulously expensive ticket to the middle class that is lorded over by middle managers who love giving speeches in goofy gowns, and take their orders from hedge fund managers who have sucked their fortunes out of the pockets of the working class and splash their names on campus buildings like two-year-olds declaring themselves the King of the World. The ability to make a good living in the higher ed industry is inversely proportional to the amount you actually care about education. Universities are, at best, a grand sorting ground that divides those who can and cannot see through bullshit. I’m sorry that a lot of kids may get kicked in the teeth in coming weeks to learn this. But the adults who aren’t smart enough to see that the kids are right are a much, much greater tragedy.
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The police showed up on my campus yesterday and used rubber bullets, tear gas, and tasers, assaulted and arrested two faculty members. The footage is viral. I have colleagues wringing their hands about graduation getting canceled after these Covid kids already missed their high school ceremony.
A student walked into my office in tears yesterday and said, We don’t need commencement—we need dialogue.
My heart is hurting. Every single word of your essay is true.
Sometimes for pure incisiveness you rise to level with the best work of Hunter Thompson. Not quite the tears-inducing humor that came roaring out of that drug barn but I value the fact that you value your liver more than he did.
Well done.