On the Corrupt University System
Listen to this essay
Creston Davis
Like some academics, I was always struck by the operative contradictions and hypocrisy of what today constitutes “academe”, the so-called, “Ivory Tower.” The contradictions are many and inextricably tied to the economic architecture of this debt-creating industry. For example, one raison d’etre of higher education as such is to train the next generation to develop the critical thinking skill set needed for the continuation and development of healthy social relations - at the same time creating ways humanity might get along. Yet, the reality is the opposite. The very means of developing critical decision skills that keep social powers in healthy checks and balances is the same procedure through which students are systematically forced into student debt.
Student debt hanging over a graduate’s head forces them into largely underpaid employment in a way that compromises the rich fabric that weaves together a thoughtful and healthy society. Instead, owing to the irresponsible costs of higher education, what happens is that education is interpreted as a mere means of gaining an economic outcome. In this way, learning the art and science of thinking well, is marginalized or simply undermined by more practical degrees (business, for example). The very means of liberating the mind through critical education, are thus the same means that undermine perceived economic outcomes.
“What kind of job will my daughter get with a degree in philosophy?” was a frequent refrain parents would ask me when I taught in the debt creating industry. I would reply, “How about your daughter develops into a fully independent thinking being with the capacity to make informed decisions based on facts, history and evidence?” But that reply, as you can imagine, doesn’t go over too well. Said differently, the cost of developing a critical, independent stance in our society through college or university training, is so economically immense the consequences of which are socially and personally damaging. One result is that the humanities are forced to fold to the pressure. I don’t need to spell out the dangerous political and historical consequences of the current state of higher education even as they worship their corporate sponsored sports programs as students take another turn around the campus’ lazy river on a pink floating device.
Another blatant contradiction is that administrators, those unthinking bureaucrats sitting around in posh floral-filled offices, now outnumber the faculty. And the faculty itself? Today the university is composed of about 70% overworked and underpaid adjunct professors. In other words, the teaching quality is attacked from the double-flank of (a) voluptuous indifferent administrative procedures; and (b) burnt out faculty who can’t afford to engage the student on an individual qualitative level that makes all the difference. The university and college, in sum, has morphed into an HR job-hunter corporation.
There are many other contradictions - not the least of which is the systematic dissolution of faculty and research protections such as tenure. And the faculty who publish books in high-flying academic presses? We must ask, what happens when such research findings are published? Well, I’ll tell you: What happens is that the contradictory system of higher education is itself validated and reproduced. In other words, the high-flying faculty members at colleges and R1 institutions who publish is tantamount to an act that justifies the validity of the corrupt state of education as such. This is how the contradiction is justified and reproduced. This is how the contradictions of higher debt-creating education are kept invisible.
We must admit, this scheme is strategically brilliant if you want to kill thinking and academic freedom, put students into economic harm, unleash unchecked corporate power, and dissolve the social good. Welcome to debt-colonized higher education in the west that’s coming to a country near you.
And why then are we so shocked, insulted and surprised when political leaders cannot tell fact from fiction? Why are we stupefied when we stand by and watch the most obscene propaganda machine designed and deployed to purposely misinform the public in order to create outcomes that put the public health in danger?
Unless trained academics collectively form an alternative to this catastrophic scenario in the procedure of thinking as such, in a generation or two they will find themselves replaced by AI machine built professors otherwise known as propaganda grading machines.