In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

—

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education [via]

I’m intrigued by the use of Cleveland State as a counter-example

Other than that everything I read about higher education lately makes me feel despondent. Like, seriously, what am I even doing here?

Being willing to sit in a boring classroom for 12 years, and then sign up for four more years and then sign up for three or more years after that—well, that’s a pretty good measure of your willingness to essentially do what you’re told.

—

Samuel Bowles in an excellent interview about income inequality in New Mexico published by the Santa Fe Reporter, Born Poor? [via]

ugh.

The truth is that poverty, and everything connected to it, is a systemic issue, not an issue of choice. It’s a lot easier to make it to that parent-teacher conference when you have a good job with benefits and child care. And it’s a lot easier to have that good job when your parents could afford to get you into a good college, and when your family’s lived for generations in a neighborhood with access to public transportation and grocery stores — when you never had to learn about redlining. When the ground you walk on doesn’t make you or your kids sick, because your neighborhood has always had the political clout to keep that oil refinery from being built next door.

In other words: show me the school system with high test scores, and I’ll show you the neighborhood whose houses are worth enough for the resulting property taxes to pay for after-school tutoring programs.

— SC Lt. Gov. Bauer: Free School Lunches Encourage ‘Stray Animals’ to ‘Breed’ [via]

The student lives in a state of protracted infancy because it is the function of the University to train future, docile low-level functionaries. This state of protracted infancy is seen in the classrooms, where students sit quietly in military formation, accepting the nonsense professors spew. The student is there, content and misguided, believing that the classroom is a setting for some privileged and serious learning. Thus the student eagerly accepts the traditional teacher-student relationship. [and if they aren’t eager, they leave with a life of loan debt ahead of them…]
It is in the University where submissiveness is ingrained ever more easily. Such inculcations formerly had to be forced upon the white-collar workers; now they are easily absorbed and passed along by the mass of future low-level functionaries. Students are being trained for jobs comparable to those of 20th century skilled workers; except, back then, skilled workers never expected promotions.
The student clings to the crumbling prestige of the University, and, in comparison to the former level of general bourgeois culture, the machine-made specialized education is just as profoundly debased at the intellectual level because the modern economic system requires the mass production of uneducated workers who have been rendered incapable of thinking—like domesticated cows.
The University is, in fact, a training ground for future docile, submissive workers. On these training grounds, the student unashamedly lives an overt childish existence. The tighter authority’s chains shackle the student, the freer the student believes s/he is.
The University has become an institution for organizing ignorance; “high culture” disappears at the same rate as the school assembly lines produce professors; professors are scum and most would be jeered at in any high school classroom. But the University student is oblivious to all of this and continues to listen obligingly to the masters; the student consciously suspends all critical judgment so as to wallow in the mystical state of being a student—someone seriously committed to learning serious things—and hopes thereby to learn the latest “truths” and repeat them as her/his original thoughts.

— The Enemy Within, by La Ventana Collective

1. EVERY OFFER OF DIALOGUE AND DISCUSSION FROM THE ADMINISTRATION IS A STRATEGY FOR SILENCING US, AND SHOULD BE RECOGNIZED AS SUCH.
2. ONE ACTION, ONE DEMAND
3. COPS OFF CAMPUS
4. FACULTY: STAND WITH STUDENTS, PUSH BACK AGAINST THE ADMINISTRATION, OR GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY.
5. HISTORY IS MADE BY THOSE WHO SAY NO

— Five Axioms for Action at UC Davis

And to the majority of the students, from those paying their way to those swimming in debt, all used as collateral by the Regents, who bravely occupied buildings across California and fought the police against the barricades – we say this clearly: we are with you! We stood by you as you faced down the police in the storming rain and defended the occupiers. Your actions are an inspiration to us all and we hope to meet you again on the front lines. In you we see the spirit of insurgent students everywhere.
As our Austrian friends recently told us, “Take out your hairspray and your lighter”! Tear down the education factory. Attack the Left and everything that it “represents.” Attack the new bosses before they become the old ones. Life serves the risk taker – and we’re rolling the fucking dice!

— The Bricks We Throw at Police Today Will Build the Liberation Schools of Tomorrow

Thesis 0.1: The University is a Machine in the Network of Capitalism & Empire. Does anyone still pretend that earning a degree is anything other than job training? Can professors still hide that their knowledge is commodified? Is it not clear that the university is the lap-dog of the state?
Thesis 0.2: There is No Crisis. It is all Business as Usual. We cry for the loss of a dream that never was. The university was never ours. After shaking off the unessential it will rise from the grave merely mutated and continue to serve its master.
Thesis 0.3: The University Cannot be Saved. Stop occupying dead space. Our demands merely echo through the empty corridors. There is nothing here for us to take-back or transform, except their administration of an infertile garden. [It’s like taking woodshop without having anything to give your parents at the end of the semester]
Thesis 0.4: Defect to the Invisible University! Abandon the university! Join the university! We are building a new community in the shell of the old: an universitas magistrorum et scholarium, a community of teachers and scholars.

— Four Theses on The Invisible University [via]