College an education in disillusionment

As we cruised down Fifth Avenue, my friend shifted slightly in the passenger seat and lit… As we cruised down Fifth Avenue, my friend shifted slightly in the passenger seat and lit another cigarette. He gazed out at the teeming crowds on the Friday night sidewalks and said, “Jesus. Freshmen everywhere. I just look at them and all I can think is, ‘You have no idea what the hell is about to happen to you.'”

The orange glow of his first drag illuminated the dark interior of the car for a split second as he cracked his window and the wind and rain and stink filtered in. In his oddly articulate and muted drawl, he continued: “Think for a second about what you think college is supposed to be when you get here, like everything you’re so sure you’re gonna do and all your little plans. You think you’re gonna keep getting your straight A’s and it’s gonna look like the brochure and soon you’ll rule the world. Like, four years of beautiful autumn afternoons, one after the other. Shit, I used to get straight A’s.”

The guy had a point. Here he was, one of the smartest guys I’d ever met, professing with total honesty that he was a failure as an academic. I can’t blame him. Guys like him are castaways from the Success Generation, fawned over by teachers and parents their whole lives, imbued with the idea that once they get to college they’ll somehow find themselves awash in a sea of ideas and endlessly stimulating intellectual fodder. “It won’t be like high school,” they tell you. “There’ll be tons of people like you when you get to college. College is a place for thinkers like you.”

Yeah, they say a lot of things about college. They only do it because they want you to believe that your efforts are worth something, that working hard and thinking hard pay off, that there’s something more to learning and you’ll be able to tap into it someday.

But then comes that haze, those first few months of college, lost in crowds of thousands of people, in line at Thackeray, asleep in the back of your Intro to Psych class. Suddenly there’s a shortage of beautiful autumn days and you learn that sometimes, even when you’re doing well, you feel like you’re behind the eight ball the whole time.

The truth is, intellectual satisfaction is a utopia. At the end of the day, college isn’t about learning; it’s about money. Higher education is big business, a cash cow institution. If there is one enduring truth about institutions, it is that their top priority is self-preservation. I’m not gunning for higher education’s respectability here, I just think it’s important that people realize that, first and foremost, this is a business and we are consumers.

While mom and dad and teacher bombard you with rosy ideas about college for what they think is your own good, make no mistake – colleges and universities do it for their own good. Is there anything more ludicrous than the promise of the liberal arts education: enlightenment for just $32,000 a year?

Following up on the promise, presumably, is the professor’s job. Unfortunately, the mercilessly competitive publish-or-perish game draws maybe more than its share of the professor’s attention. Research helps them stay visible and relevant, and puts a good face on the university, but what does it actually do to spread enlightenment?

What’s that, you say? You wrote 24 books on Cartesian metaphysics? Two hundred articles published in academic journals? Academic journals are trade magazines, kids, always will be. I can’t escape the notion that the only people reading Professor Fancypants’ 24 books on Cartesian metaphysics are other professors who also study Descartes and probably have a similar collection of jackets with elbow patches.

What does this do for the undergrads? Nothing at all. The academic community works diligently to churn out research so that it can be read by other members of the academic community, who inevitably go on to engage in debate, supporting and refuting each others’ perspectives, then supporting and refuting the endorsements and refutations.

Think about this for a second. Someone publishes an idea. Someone else defends it. Another someone attacks it. Another still defends the attack, and so on. What’s going on here isn’t an exploration and expansion of the realm of ideas and the breadth of human knowledge, it’s a pack of hungry wolves seizing on some carrion so that they can eat. It’s not a progression of knowledge, it’s an infinite intellectual regress, a pattern that is not only idle but predictable.

“We’re so proud of Dr. Fancypants, whose groundbreaking research on Cartesian metaphysics was published in the Harvard Journal of Stuff His Colleagues Will Read,” the university announces. It may not do anything for you, the student, but you can bet it comes with an eight percent tuition increase. And there’s the rub. They continue to sell it, and we continue to buy it. We buy into it so big that the rate of tuition increase in America dwarfs inflation.

I’m not saying there isn’t any value to this experience. But there are a lot of broken promises. The realities are a lot different from what we’re taught, and it’s hard to reconcile that once you get here, if you’ve been fed the idealistic imagery enough. Guys like my chain-smoking friend, like me, are left with the lingering feeling that the intellectual mecca we were promised wasn’t exactly here when we showed up on campus.

We waited so long for our world of ideas, and we found ourselves half asleep in an intolerable 400-person lecture. We’d paid the first bill and it suddenly didn’t look like the brochure anymore. It was cold and raining, and it turned out that, in college, beautiful autumn days are just as few and far between as they are anywhere else.

E-mail Dan Richey at manager@pittnews.com.