[This one’s for Flanigan, as some sort of explanation; and for Michele L., as a warning.]
When I look at a problem, my usual method is to search for the function. What does a thing do? Back when I still worked on my car, I began by looking at function – or specifically what was not functioning. When the car didn’t turn over, I knew to look at three things first: the battery, the starter, and the alternator. Beyond that, I dreaded looking at the master cylinder. Beyond that, there was wiring and the damn CPU to consider – that little brain box that no modern car can run without.
The same is true when I consider philosophical or theoretical issues. I begin with a quest for function. I’ve always loved philosophy, and I struggle with my tendency to get lost in theory (because it’s always safer inside my head than outside my door.) I spent most of my time my senior year of high school locked away in the library muddling my way through the Great Books of the Western World in the Reference section. The first one I read was the volume on Descartes and Spinoza. Not because it was the first, but because I remembered a bad joke from some sit com – I think it was MASH – in which the punch line was a warning not to put “de cart before de horse.” Ok. So I wasn’t an intellectual. But Descartes was a good place to start – if only because it in reading Descartes that I started to understand the Scientific Method. And an important part of Method is to begin with the most common denominator. The most obvious thing. And for me, that thing tends to be process. How a thing works. You know a bicycle is a bicycle by how it works, and that’s the difference between a Schwinn and Harley Davidson. So you follow process back to method… you look at how a thing works (or doesn’t work) and back track… which is what mechanics and intellectuals do most of the time.
The best definition I’ve ever seen that describes an intellectual comes from Bill Cosby: “An intellectual is somebody who studies what normal people do everyday.” An intellectual begins with process – for example, what ants do when they’re marching in a row carrying back food that’s a hundred times their weight – and follow it back to function. Ants, and most insects, are function based. Each one has a job in relation to group, and each one is ultimately easy to replace. Except the queen, of course. But then, every pyramid has its top. This is true of insects, the tombs of Pharaohs, and corporate America. By studying the process, eventually you get to understand the function. And when you understand how a thing functions, you understand the essence of the thing. Yes, there are variables. Yes, there are the unaccounted for bubbles of oddness and maybe even unexplained random behavior. But variation is part of the natural order – and if we can pull nothing else from Darwin, we can pull that truism. A variation only becomes part of the long term natural order if it continues to serve a specific function.
Ok. To the point. If you’ve read this far, you deserve that, at least. If you go back and look through all my rants about higher education, there is a consistent theme – a disagreement over function. This is due in part to the role that education has played in my life. But the things that piss me off the most – those behaviors I view as unwelcome variables – are, I now realize, not just temporary variations. They are part of the natural progression of higher education that has had nothing to do with me or my purposes.
Originally, public education came into existence because literacy was considered imperative to the success of the Democratic Experiment. Higher Education was a gift (as much as I hate to admit it) from the Catholic Church, which sequestered its neophytes and taught them all the skills they would need – including literacy – so they could lead illiterate parishioners. (Coincidentally, it was the early Catholic Church that opposed both public education and the printing press.) The process was not at all touchy feely, but the function was clear. At certain points in American history, education has been used to either forcibly assimilate groups (in the case of Native Americans as well as every immigrant population that filtered through Ellis Island) or maliciously misinform and mislead chosen groups (in the case of African slaves, post Civil War African-Americans, and women in general) to advantage of some other group (white guys like me.)
The same is true of modern universities. I do like to think there was a time when colleges and universities focused on enabling individual and collective enlightenment and self-knowledge, as well as the preservation of collective knowledge. But I am beginning to accept that this was never the case. Maybe that was the intention; I suppose there’s no way of really knowing what anyone’s real intentions were. But a university, like a car, can’t function outside or beyond its original intended function. There was a time – not all that far off – when I went to school because I wanted to be a smarter, better version of me. I wasn’t worried about getting a better job or finding the entrance to a comfortable middle-class American life. Actually, if I’m being honest, part of my attraction to the academic world was that it was a perfect reflection of my interior life. When I got tired of bullshit monkey work (white collar and blue collar) I could always go back school, take out student loans, and live outside my head the way I preferred to live inside my head.
My mistake, I think, was in hoping I could make a living at it and be content.
As much as I would like to enforce my idea of this perfect function on the all-mighty institution of higher education, I am coming to understand that this is impossible. Not because it’s an impossible task – but because it was never intended in the first place. A car can never be an airplane, and a bureaucratic institution will never really care about individual experience. Some people may point to the move to open universities in the 60’s and 70’s – the so-called Open University – but this is proving to be nothing more than a naturally occurring evolutionary variation with no staying power. Most universities are too expensive, and the possibility of loans looming over head scare people from ever trying. Technical schools fill the void, but the function of these institutions is to train a person for a specific job rather than educate them to embrace all possibilities. With the digital revolution, online education has taken off to the point that traditional institutions are now have to openly compete with online providers – and for most people cost and convenience outweigh any prestige factor that comes from attending a major university. The traditional university, logically, focuses on the most important thing. Survival. This means getting rid of all the high falutin’ ideas and sticking to hardnosed pragmatism. This means raising tuition and fees. This means cutting programs and treating faculty like replaceable cogs and rewarding PR achievements over solid classroom performance. This means streamlining and allowing tenure to go the way of the dinosaur. The truth is, universities were always intended to be exclusive – and by function, anti-democratic – and that’s how they function with exponentially increasing precision.
And I don’t like it. Not one fucking bit. I work with people who call this perspective – an acceptance of How Things Are – realism. They are content to work within these constraints, if only to have the occasional glimmer of that elusive ideal purpose. They are worker ants content to haul food back to the queen. They are bugs who could be gods if they only stopped assuming that Spinoza was correct in Ethics.
This has given me no end of aggravation, since it’s always been my assertion that educated people know enough to know how to act when they’re being screwed over. But as I struggle with my own idealism – an idealism I insist on cleaving to in spite of all the available evidence – I am beginning to understand that maybe one of those evolutionary variations – like the Open University, dinosaurs, and, potentially western civilization – is looking back at me on those mornings I take the trouble to shave.
