universitas

: the whole, Latin

Buzzing from a day of demonstrations and a couple of dark IPAs, I must write just a few thoughts to free them from my mind, and hopefully avail sleep:

1. Public education is imperative in any democracy. An educated public is necessary for participatory government. Obvi.
2. “Education” must be robustly conceived, rather than conceived as preparation for a vocation. A full life – and full qualification to participate (if desired) in self government – means a fully developed capacity to critically interpret the world, to morally reason, to appreciate aesthetics and music and rhyme, and rhetoric, as much as numbers. A full life, and a fully active mind, requires the humility of curiosity, the acknowledgement of things one has yet to learn, the drive and modesty to seek the information and testimonies to fill in the gaps in one’s knowledge. Not everyone will want to take advantage of this education, but everyone must have the opportunity to, in order for the ideal of democracy to survive (in this and my next point, I paraphrase an excellent essay by Wendy Brown, Political Science professor at Berkeley, in the current issue of Representations).
3. The privatization of education at all levels threatens both of these things – first, by making quality education inaccessible to vast portions of the population without the incurrence of significant, possibly debilitating (and almost assuredly compelling, in ways I will not analyze here) debt; and second, by infusing the university with neoliberal rationality that urges departments to assess their scholars according to business-speak metrics, KPIs, student turnover, etc. Scholarship gets increasingly specialized in parallel to the specialization of work in the marketplace, or follows the dictates of corporate interests funding particular research initiatives; conversation in academia narrows and grows defensive; students are seen as revenue sources keeping an unstable system temporarily afloat.

These are three of the reasons why we striked, today. Additional reasons include the brutality of police last Wednesday against unarmed, peaceful students (despite the Chancellor’s double-negative designation of the students, faculty, and staff as “not non-violent,” ie some ambiguous, specious category between violent and peaceful) and the dumbfounding cluelessness of the administration in response to these events. The fact that former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass was one of the many individuals whose ribs were met with police baton helped generate contrition, or the performance thereof, by the administration, but the Chancellor’s shameful excuse for his initial defense of the police action did nothing to quell the passions stirred against him (this defense amounted to: I was in Japan, and so I did not watch the YouTube videos and did not know just how atrocious the campus violence against unarmed students was – cut me a break).

Today’s actions of course are not an end in themselves. I left Sproul Plaza sometime after 10pm, buoyed home on my bike by the fading strains of drum music and excited chatter, recollected chants, and some of Robert Reich’s incredibly simple, and powerful, observations about the strange illogic of popular rhetoric defending the privatization of education: we hear simultaneously that we cannot afford to educate the public, and that the US is the world’s richest country. We could add to this simply observed contradiction some specific irrationalities of California: we are the only state that does not tax oil extraction, we stick to a 1970s era cap on property taxes, and we pour more money into our prison population, per inmate, than into our education system per student. An easy comparison to the unsatisfying logic of this system exists in the administration’s defense of police violence against an “unsafe, unsanitary” encampments: defend public safety by breaking the ribs of unarmed students.

But to my point: today is not the end. We need a future containing more than protests and strikes. There are some clearly repairable flaws in California’s education system, and some flaws that require quite a lot of careful, serious thought to repair. For this difficult work ahead, let’s be thankful that we have a history of worldclass education behind the minds of the men and women (and students) who can undertake the mission.

in conclusion: sometimes democracy gets in tents.

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