College Made Me Stupider

College made me stupider. Or at least the classes I took at college made me stupider. In the time I took passively absorbing and regurgitating information, I could have doing what I wanted to do. I could have learned through doing things with other people, or studied what I wanted to study. It’s called self-directed or collaborative learning, and it’s about the only way anyone truly learns anything. College workloads discourage self-directed and collaborative learning. Hence, I am now slightly dumber than I would have been had I not gone to school and had spent the tuition money on something else.

I think that, deep down, we all understand this. Think a little bit, and you’ll realize that you learned about the things you’re truly interested in outside of class. Same goes with most of the people you know. The only exceptions are the budding young academics I'm friends with- all three of them. You really only learn how to be an academic here, since all you're doing is academic work. You naturally internalize the lifestyle, the manner of thinking and acting. College is an institution that, like all institutions, is built to sustain itself: it trains people to be academics so they can then go on to train other young people to be academics. No wonder the market is flooded with wretched graduate students who can’t find an academic job.

It’s not as though I learned nothing here- but it would be remarkable if I did anything for four years and learned nothing. The difference is that I paid $2oo,ooo for these particular four years. While I did learn a few scattered things about philosophy (my major), I don’t have any profound or cohesive understanding of the subject. I can barely apply any of the philosophy I learned here to my own understanding of the world, which is the real value of knowledge. After four years at this college, I have a profound understanding only of what’s wrong with it. I wonder if that was worth $200,000.

Of course it wasn’t, which suggests to me that school is about something else- namely, showing to employers that you’re willing to take orders for four more years. And not only that, you’re willing to pay to take orders. It’s funny when you think about it. Usually, if you’re taking orders from someone, they’re at least paying you; here, it’s the opposite. But college is about landing a job. Students understand this.

"The most commonly mentioned reasons to go to college included getting career training, getting a better job, and making more money" the journalist David Kirp writes in his overview of the corporate college, Shakespeare, Einstein, and The Bottom Line. Or, more broadly, as the sociologist Mitchell Stevens wrote in his book Creating a Class, higher education is another step in the factory process of "social reproduction" which "systematically favors the wealthy, well-educated, and well-connected." This is so obvious as to be almost intuitive. Only in self-congratulatory college propaganda is school centrally about learning or “intellectual autonomy” or whatever.

As Hunter Thompson might say, “there’s something seriously bent” about heading off into the middle of Ohio to submerge oneself in a neo-feudal model of subservience to a covenant of learned priests. It’s even odder to want to pay $200,000 for it. But the kind of person who’s able to make it into an elite institution like Oberlin is usually the kind of person who would pay that $200,000, because that kind of person has been taking orders his or her whole life. We did every idiotic thing our public school teachers told us to do and went through the same grueling process of selling ourselves ("the admissions process").

Noam Chomsky describes it as a trial by idiocy: "People are filtered out for obedience. If you can guarantee lots of stupidity in the educational system, you know that the only people who will make it through are people like me who are willing to do it no matter how stupid it is because we want to go to the next step." Oberlin may have crowned itself as an eternally electic, left of center college, but most of its students are bred though stupidity to obey. We would otherwise not have made it this far. It cannot be otherwise.

This basic fact explains Oberlin. There’s a reason we’re defined by awkwardness: anyone who could deny their own feelings for their whole life is bound to be something of an emotional cripple. If there is such a thing as emotional intelligence, than many Oberlin students (including and especially myself) are emotional idiots as surely as the kids in the stupid class back in our high schools were academic idiots. William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor, described this phenomenon as “Ivy retardation”:

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic…. Social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense.

This intellectual disparity helps explain why the much of the arts here are so careful and academic (and thus completely useless), why the dating scene is pathetic, and why life at Oberlin is often flat and uninteresting. The reason is simple: it's long been understood that obedience to authority is anathema to spontaneity and communal interaction (as well as, it should be mentioned, true learning). But “we came here to study”, right?

Much of college is useless beyond career advancement, but there are exceptions. The sciences are real academic subjects that can be taught successfully in schools; unlike the "social sciences" and the arts, they truly are a specialized form of knowledge that can only be learned in a rigorous setting under established authorities. And, as opposed to most of America, people actually do things at a college. Colleges, because of their pre-capitalist roots, have some kind of autonomy relative to the outside world that does allow for some kind of community. Oberlin’s civil society may be withering and of little consequence, but at least it exists.

But otherwise, while Oberlin may be "a good school", it remains a school. It's problems are mostly inherent. I certainly won't miss it. Or at least I hope I won't. Imagine if the rest of the world is miserable enough that I actually would...

We Hate Ourselves More Than We Hate Rove

The strangest thing about this Karl Rove visit is how liberals at Oberlin clearly hated the protestors more than they hated Rove. It shouldn't be a contest: on the one hand, you had a professional (and knowing) slanderer and propagandist for the most reactionary American administration in at least 60 years; on the other, you had people whose worst crime would be to disrupt a mediocre speech by a man's who's mediocre in all respects except in his cruelty and lack of scruples. (He's not a "political genius," guys. The regurgitation of this piece of pure media hype proves that Oberlin has, if nothing else, successfully cultivated the next generation of Time magazine reporters.)

Yet the hate isn't directed at the bad guy; rather, it's directed at the people who want to fight him- even though we all may hate Rove, at least in theory. And any excuse, no matter how presumptuous, is good enough for the hate. The protests won't be effective, Rove won't care, we're just a bunch of whiny college students, we’re spoiled, a protest would be self-congratulatory, etc. All these excuses don't even come close to explaining the sheer amount of abuse the protestors received.

Which convince me that the real reason for the hate-fest can be best explained by an article about liberal hatred toward Michael Moore, written years ago by John Dolan at the brilliant The eXile:

"You hate Moore because he's likely to drag you into a streetfight. That's what happened at the Oscars: Moore took the podium and used it as a weapon. He bludgeoned Bush with that Oscar, right there in front of everyone, until the crowd booed him off. And they didn't boo him because they were "conservatives," either. I'd bet that the loudest booers were classic H-wood liberals. They booed because when Moore started fighting, they felt ashamed, then angry -- because in some vestigial corner of their minds, they knew they should have been standing with him.

"As a lifelong coward, I know the feeling, the shame of watching someone fight your fight for you--and I know that it's not your tormentors you hate most. No, it's your champion, your damned officious champion, whose courage only throws your cowardice into relief, that you hate most--after yourself."

But the excuses were interesting for being revealing. Take the “protests won’t be effective” argument. It was the argument the anti-protestors made the most; it also happened to be exactly false. About the only time colleges make the news at all these days is when there are student protests against prominent figures who are invited to speak at them.

Professor Steve Volk tacitly acknowledged the effectiveness of protest in a letter that encouraged student to observe decorum during the Rove speech. He listed Chris Hedges and Michael Oren as notable examples of people who were famously disrupted during their speeches. Other examples that ring out are the protests against Ehud Olmert at the University of Chicago and even a rather impressive protest against that indefatigable idiot Martin Peretz when he spoke at Harvard. This means Harvard activists upstaged us, and for a significantly less repulsive figure. Can we please stop promoting that obnoxiously self-aggrandizing “oh, we’re just so darn radical at Oberlin” cliché now?

And I’m willing to bet that some of the same people who directed spite at the Rove protestors watched or could watch some of the above examples on Youtube with glee. And we all enjoyed the video of the Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at George Bush or of the student who pied Thomas Friedman. It’s only when such protests effect us that they suddenly become despicable.

Of course, the protestors share the blame in all this. Campus activism- real campus activism, the kind that has acted on the remarkable pretense that Oberlin is a community and could thus unite around certain causes- has emerged from hiding a few times since I’ve been a student here. The Coalition was an example; the Karl Rove Is Coming activists are another. And each treated politics as though it were a grim duty, our dubious birthright as privileged Oberlin students. The Coalition argued that we were spoiled and ignorant of racial issues, necessitating immediate reeducation. The Karl Rove is Coming protestors, on the other hand, argued that it was our responsibility to protest Rove so that we could vindicate our reputation as a liberal campus.

On this, the protestors and the anti-protestors were united: it was our duty to the school to either make a ruckus or to sit quietly to show that we were either liberal or tolerant enough to honor the school’s image. It was typical self-deprecating Oberlin politics on a slightly grander scale; eating out of dumpsters and not showering to conserve water expanded into political theatre.

What everyone seemed to miss is that protesting Karl Rove could be fun. Not fun in a cute, Harkness sort of way, but in a righteous and invigorating way. Imagine the spectacle of hundreds of students, unapologetic in their noble hatred for Karl Rove, directing a furious and joyous tide of boos at that repulsive pig- because we could, and because we wanted to. As everyone knew (deep down, at least), that kind of bold display would become Oberlin legend and would have an effect both in and outside of the campus- which is the real reason that people hated the protestors.

We’re too spoiled and lucky to be able to go to such a venerable institution to allow ourselves any joy or collective gratification. The reputation of the school was paramount, however false that reputation actually is. And the same crippling deference that defines this wretched campus scored another victory. On that note, I should add that I didn’t go to the speech/ protest. Maybe it was because I was too busy, or because I never got around to buying a ticket- or maybe because, “in some vestigial corner” of my mind, I was afraid.