The Academic Time Warp

Academia is a world unlike any other that one will find in any other part of our culture. It is challenging, it is open, it chews up many a weak mind and spits it back out while taking other minds and brutally molding them into something strong and refined and worthy of a sophisticated life elsewhere in the world. The politics of academia are unequaled, and the personalities more interesting than what one will find in any day-to-day job or community organization. However, something happens to these individuals during this schooling process that both robs them of their humanity and gives them permission to leave social and cultural norms and responsibilities by the wayside. What is it?

I, like the majority of human beings living in the world today, did not come from a community of highly educated citizens. There were, of course, a handful of doctors, lawyers, and professionals who lived in and did work in my community, but they were often detached and more or less seen as role models for the rest of us. They interacted on the human level as little as possible with those whom they saw as beneath them and did their jobs, which for the most part allowed them to interact professionally and in a detached manner. Starting my life, as everyone does, as an uneducated person building on my experiences and studies to reach the level I have achieved today, I was very curious about what happened to a person once he or she left high school and began the world of higher education. I can remember as a younger person watching my older cousins go into college with an exuberance and excitement, a wantonness to make a difference and change the world, only to come out the other side better dressed, soft spoken, and seemingly incapable of communicating with the rest of the world. The excitement was gone. The enthusiasm was gone. The interest in other people disappeared and those social and cultural concerns were no more. It was as though they were superheros who had slipped away into a phonebooth for several years only to come out as Clark Kent instead of the other way around. People were no longer people, but clients, patients, and markets to be sold to. They were something to be polled and studied and manipulated for the sake of impressing a distinguished few standing outside the rat cage, poking and prodding at their experiments.

Now that I am older and have experienced this phonebooth for myself I can see that it is not so much like a secret place to change clothes as it is like walking into a hurricane and finding ways of seeming civilized and cordial while keeping from falling into a hundred mile-away stare that others might mistake as lunacy. Academia is the wardrobe that we walk through in anticipation of the snowy-white pleasantries of Narnia only to come out the other side in professional clothing, armed only with our wits, in the same caustic warzone we were a part of earlier in life. Suddenly we are responsible for other people's lives. They want to know what we know and what we plan to do about it and if we can not answer fast enough or with the appropriate conviction, we are tossed to the wolves; all of our hard work written off as insignificant and impractical. Furthermore, the wolves want to know why they should respect us when we don't even have any money. They want to know why the hell anyone would spend years of their life and tens of thousands of dollars on a wardrobe that just kicks them out on the other side with a head full of theories and statistics and an uppidy attitude on how to solve the world's problems. But they don't know what goes on in there.

Those who never enter the wardrobe, or who tried to enter the wardrobe and became overwhelmed with how different it was in there and how complicated the world is beneath the surface, don't seem to get that there never was a promise of riches or snowy-white pleasantries. This seems to be an urban myth of college that is told to young people so that they will stay focused on getting into this world. What we can't tell them is that they are actually choosing the lesser of two evils. If we truly wanted our kids to go to college we should take them out to work on construction sites and fishing boats. We should send them off to actual warzones or make them live in roach-infested apartments on food stamps. We should make them work thirty-five hours a week at a corporation that requires fulltime employment to receive healthcare benefits and remind them that the corporation will NEVER give them those extra five hours. We should show them how the rest of the country has to live who could not afford, or could not make it through collge.

What college offers is an education, nothing more, nothing less. It allows one to stay on par with those also getting an education so that they cannot be tricked or fooled or bamboozled into the projects of those less-ethical graduates who, feeling duped by the system as well, decide they will make up for those lost years and missing dollars by smooth-talking the uneducated into working for them for nothing or handing over their hard-earned cash for products and services nowhere worth what they will charge.

I now see that that far-away look and lack of exuberance I saw in my relatives was the look of knowing that now that they had this information about how the "real world" works, and now that they had spent their first ten year's salary on learning these tricks, they would not be off to solve the problems of the world and help the less-fortunate as their high school teachers had hoped, but instead would be tip-toeing the line of ethics for the rest of their days in an attempt to uphold the worthiness of their academic experience. They will scrimp and save and withdrawal themselves from everyday life to build fortresses that protect them and their family from the uneducated wolves, fighting to get by in the world. They will send their kids to private schools where they can learn how to get ahead without the distracting influence of the poor and uneducated. They will teach their kids philosophies that allow them to believe that the wolves are not struggling and oppressed people who need their help, but are lazy, good-for-nothing fools who don't care about their children's futures or about taking care of their families. They will build a world so neurotic and stress-filled that no one will ever be accepted in this world until they are AS neurotic and stress-filled as those already living there. And that's how they will know that you are hard-working and worthy. If you are relaxed and still able to communicate and still want to communicate with the general public, you must be one of THEM and thus you cannot play in this game. If you are not surrounded by only the most wealthy and highly educated, you are low-class yourself and unworthy of the time of those in the bourgeois and aristocracy. You had your chance, and you blew it so you could remain a "normal" lay person. Now you are out, until you can find the energy to get stressed out about things that don't ultimately matter and sink yourself into a debt that you will never pay off...then you will be "with the program" and the civilized world will include you in their reindeer games.

It's rather pathetic really and I don't know which side I should be more concerned with: the side that thinks college is so unimportant that they throw away an opportunity at living a rich and full life and passing on the information necessary for their kids to live an even better life so that they can make some fast cash and eat fast food the rest of their lives, or the side that after a couple generations of financial comfort completely forget that there is a whole world of people out there starving and dying and destroying eachother while we sip coffee and talk about high art. And the fact that both exist within the same country does not speak well to the systems we have created for ourselves that allow such a dicotomy of beliefs, both with enough money to have serious influence over other people. It is something that has been with me my entire life and something I'm sure others are experiencing or are working/ drinking extra hard to ignore. I don't know what the answer is. I only highlight the problems as I see them.