Institutes of lower education
Modern universities bear almost no resemblance to the institutions of higher learning that they have always aspired to be
Who can be considered a highly educated person in today’s world? Well, does he or she have a fairly quick take on references from The Simpsons? Studied The Wire? Is this person fluent with, and grateful for, the pullulating neologisms for gender — does he know his “cis” from his “hetero,” his “two-spirited” from his “intersex”? Au courant on the latest pronouns, such as “ze” and “xe” for him and her, “xem” and “xir” for (I’m guessing) them? her? they? the guy next door? A diploma is his.
On a broader plane, I’d offer that someone who hasn’t read Mansfield Park, but who is nonetheless aware that Jane Austen was an (un)witting imperialist prop for “erasing” the economics of slavery from her parlour comedies and “silenced” the sexuality of her marriage-haunted heroines, is blissfully impregnated with the wisdom of some modern university courses. As is someone who has showered a storm of trigger warnings on an unread copy of Paradise Lost, to ward off the weak and unwary from John Milton’s awesomely appalling phallocentrism and misogyny.
Or maybe you may be called an educated person if you’ve done some postgraduate work in your younger days on the now passé Madonna — such as this one from 2000: “Madonna, a pop American idol of feminism and counter-hegemony: blurring the boundaries of race, gender and sexuality.” Or, to keep the query up to date, perhaps the scholarship has abandoned history — Madonna is so 20 years ago — and raced to the more demanding texts and hermeneutic hip tossing grinds of Beyoncé, as in this thesis (in progress): “The Occult, Feminism and Beyoncé.” Or, yet one more that surveys the bootylicious superstar “using Semiotics, Political Economy and Marxist Feminism to analyze (her, zir, zem) songs and videos (concluding) that Beyoncé is indeed a feminist, but she’s empowering women liberally.”
It was Colby Cosh’s article in Thursday’s National Post that brings me to this. He was writing about the now sadly mocked (and I’m quite sure sadly pained) NDP candidate, master’s graduate (“Race, Class, & Gender Dynamics In Interdisciplinary Teams”) and school board trustee, Alex Johnstone, who was put in the pitiful position of having to admit that, until this week, she did not know anything about, or possibly even heard of, the very demon- pearl of death camps, Auschwitz.
I’d like to be clear that I’m not here to add to the personal mockery — the Internet has taken care of that. Rather, I’d like to take up just one — I think the central one — of Cosh’s observations: “It seems some part of our system for producing intellectually responsible grown-ups has failed Johnstone.” He’s right. He’s absolutely right. And the only emendation I’d make on his statement is to get rid of “seems.”
Some universities — and, in particularly, some humanities departments — have, over the last few decades, wandered far from the primary purpose of what these institutions were design for: to teach what is worth knowing; to train the intellect; to acquaint students with, and help them appreciate, the glories of the human mind and its finest achievements.
Concomitantly, they have descended into pseudo-studies, become infatuated with low pop culture, become obsessed with faddish social justice issues, turned hypervigilant on their students’ “comfort levels” and are pruriently concerned with sexism narratives, cause politics and “identity” zealotry. They bear almost no resemblance to the institutions of higher learning — higher in its full applications — that they, at least ideally, have always aspired to be.
Junk in, junk out, is a variation on the computer axiom. Any institution that puts Madonna and hegemony in the same sentence, never mind in the title of a thesis, has cut the cords on the balloon and is floating off on some vague, directionless journey to nowhere in particular.
I think of that “rape victim” Emma Sulkowicz — a.k.a., the Mattress Bearer — who spent a year carrying a mattress around on her troubled, vacant head at Columbia University — this is Columbia we’re talking about, not some online degree factory — and had her pedestrian efforts accepted as an “art project.” If she had been working on a master’s in furniture removal, perhaps it would make sense. But she was awarded a master’s degree for making an exhibitionistic fool of herself, and a perfect mockery of her university. The administration helped, though: They allowed her to carry the shoddy mattress to her convocation.
Does anyone think Sulkowicz knows anything about the Holocaust, or that she could even spell Auschwitz? I could cite many other examples here, Sulkowicz is more emblem than outlier, but I’ll make one point alone: Any university that awarded a postgraduate degree for that unoriginal, campy and degrading performance ought to look to its charter and examine, in shame and mortification, its institutional conscience.
In this context, it is not surprising that Johnstone did not know about Auschwitz, or that she is on a school board. Rather, it is illustrative and profoundly sad.