Thinking Outside Centralization

We’re all too familiar with the expression, “After college you will enter the ‘real’ world.” And the meaning of such an expression is immediately understood. It is to say that college is not the real world but a pretend one. In college, students inhabit a fantasy in which decisions, life choices, work, and relationships are bound together. The fantasy world and the ‘real’ world are split asunder in a fashion that the college fantasy world doesn’t contain within it the full elements of existence. College, in this sense, is like a fetus in a womb of reality waiting for its birth in the world of jobs, paying off debts, reproducing the human race and having responsibilities.

But where did this split-reality emerges in the first place?

Where it comes from is a product of either: (a) an aristocratic; or (b) a monastic lifestyle. The space for learning in the pre-university stage starts from the middle-ages on and was carved out by individuals who gave up their freedom by committing themselves to religious vows in order to pursuit knowledge in a self-sustaining monastic community. This was the first stage that eventually materialized into universities such as Bologna, Naples, Paris and Oxford around the year 1,000. But after the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the gentry (business class) that resulted in the breakdown of the hegemony of the Holy Roman Catholic Empire, the modern Nation-State was born. And now education was seen not just as a religious endeavor but as a means of understanding the world through science, observation, and through commerce. The children of the gentry and aristocratic classes needed to learn the ways of the world within the modern university that wasn’t controlled strictly by a theo-centric universe. To commit time to study and travel required material resources that only the wealthy classes could afford. Knowledge = Power and the ruling elites needed to secure that power by making education unreachable to the lower classes and thus keeping them in check through ignorance.

In this way, the split between learning and living in the real world was forged. But then came a revolution, in the present day United States (1776) and a decade later in France with the French Revolution (1789). Here you had the radical idea that all human beings (if you were white, male, and land owners) had the responsibility to vote and so you needed enough educate citizens to make a republic/democracy function to keep at bay dictators, kings and queens, and tyrants who rule by unchecked fiat.

Education took another shift as a consequence that began to erode ancient notions that only the humans from some families and tribes had the capacity to rule and no one else. Now in the modern university you had resources to develop new technologies that fueled the industrial revolution, modern medicine, and a new economy altogether. Wealth was created on a scale never before measured in history. Even still, universities were occupied by students of wealthy families and overwhelmingly male and white.

New families such as the Rockefellers, Roosevelts, Stanfords, Carnagies, Fords, Dukes, JP Morgans, Westinghouses and Vanderbilts emerged on the backs of the finance, tobacco, oil, railroad, and energy sectors. Some portions of these vast stores of wealth financed early endowments that underwrote universities (university of Chicago, Duke, Vanderbilts, Wake Forrest, Stanford, etc.). And now you had universities financed by the wealthy of an explicitly robber baron capitalist ilk. The paradigm of education shifted again that came to reflect and reproduce the ideals of the ruling business elite.

After WW2 and in the wake of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the US economy was booming and that could afford to educate the GIs coming back from European and Pacific war zones. The university expanded rapidly, and because more working class students were in classrooms new ideas began to percolate in the cultural consciousness that a generation later blossomed into the 60s counter-traditional views. Feminism, civil-rights, non-violence, and the workers’ rights to own their own means of production was on the agenda on nearly every university campus across the nation. New universities were founded and an optimistic outlook took flight that guided the younger generation into new dreams. Education was now about overcoming barriers and fully realizing the potential of a democratic society.

This new optimism, the challenging of tradition, and the realization that the common citizen was just as equal to the wealthy few was just too much for the ruling elites. To shut the dreams of an equal humanity down a new economic and cultural strategy was implemented and distilled in the Lewis Powell Memorandum. The corporate elites began to implement radical tax cuts to themselves whilst keeping the tax burden the same or worse for the middle and working classes. This resulted in the massive defunding of education across all levels, public and private. Now students (not society) had to take on the burden of university education through personal student debt and with this new economic matrix came with it the radical shift in education from the optimism of the 60s to the individualism of the 90s. Now education was sought after not to install dreams of an equal humanity and a fairer society, but what the graduate could get out of the college degree. Education was seen as an individual self-centered investment so the graduate could better climb the corporate ladder and serve the CEOs like a slave.

This was the time when corporations like the NCAA hijacked collegiate sports and turned their stadiums and campuses into corporate zones, “The Citi Bank Stadium”. The food service industry took over the cafeterias signing big contracts with public and private universities to monopolize their brand. Pharmaceutical companies used the labor power, geniuses, and laboratory resources of universities to perfect and design drugs from which big-pharma took all the profits. Meanwhile, the humanities were downgraded, departments hacked, protections for faculty like tenure were denuded, and younger PhDs who were not hired via nepotistical Ivy-League networks, took on the majority of the teaching load with no protections and even less payment. Lazy rivers and extra swimming pools were installed turning the college campus into micro-disney worlds as library budgets were slashed.

The fantasy world of college today is a corporate one whose burden is carried by student debt and whose profits go to banks and corporations while the quality teaching levels were gnawed down to obeying bureaucratically designed syllabi with no interpersonal relationships between students and faculty. Is it little wonder that the college experience today in the US is medicated by hedonistic activities like beer pong while the professors are forced to publish or perish?

But what would it look like if education were taken seriously? It wouldn’t look like the university or colleges today. This is why GCAS College was founded to reclaim education that is collaborative and co-owned by faculty and graduates. The real world / college fantasy split is overcome through respecting professors and students and the intellectual labor power of understanding our world outside the corporate centralization zone. This is why GCAS College is debt free and even respects the intellectual labors of faculty and students via awarding digital assets for their time, insights and efforts.

It’s time to reclaim education not for a centralizing power (the Church or the Corporation) but for humanity as such.

Creston Davis, PhD