This will kill that
Work has stopped on the restoration of Notre Dame.
In Victor Hugo’s medieval tale of Quasimodo and Esmeralda, a renegade priest stands in a study built within the flying buttresses of that now-gutted cathedral. A Gutenberg bible sits open on his table. Pointing down to history’s first published book with one hand, he raises his other to the arching buttresses of the greatest physical achievement of his day, and declares, “Cici tuera cela”. This will kill that.
Before the printed word, humankind carved its story in the stone of its monuments. That’s what monuments were for.
Stone was as eternal as humans could imagine. Hugo’s priest understood that even granite weathers and crumbles, but a printed page could multiply endlessly and circle the globe. A mere 500 years later, paper too has become ephemera.
The internet hasn’t yet killed brick and stone educational institutions. That’s a work in progress. The pandemic has merely revealed their systemic vulnerabilities and dubious value. Getting degreed these days is like getting circumcised. Nobody can say what good it does, but they’re sure it’s important, if only because their own parents put them through it. And yet, how many baccalaureates are working in their field of study, and how many of the rest are still paying off a high degree of debt?
As we all shelter in place, the City On A Hill, hollowed of students, looks like it’s over the hill, remote. In the inescapable present, it’s no fun to be far from home. Nor is it a given that classroom doors will reopen in the fall. But times had changed long before the pandemic changed our faith in time. We have YouTubes for changing lightbulbs and parsing particle physics, for pruning fruit trees and analyzing Freud. We have access to articles, books, papers, conferences, debates and lectures, all ready when we are. No missed buses, canceled flights, maximum allowed credits or killer rents. No grades, degrees, tuition or limits to what we can learn or question in the safety of our own homes and communities. And there are online communities within communities of people pursuing similar truths. We have many ways to educate ourselves without surrendering four or six of the bravest, most energetic and adventurous years of our lives. And finally, as this pandemic moment forces us to practice responsible climate action in all things— travel, consumption, investment, social responsibility—we should question sacred institutions and begin to imagine more resilient ways to prepare young adults for mature and responsible lives in this world.
The upcoming replay of our perennial protest--now in its fourth decade--of the Regents’ original plan for eventual UCSC growth could be the last hurrah for the 1970’s legacy band assembled by the City and County to fight the good fight yet again. It will entertain those who take comfort in ritual pageantry. But in the end, our well-rehearsed Greek chorus can’t ever get what it wants, simply because no one in the UC corporate system is authorized to dispense more than crumbs. Regardless, complain is what they know how to do, and the attorney fees are nothing to sneeze at. They will continue to succeed in distracting us from the real debate.
That critical debate, on the future of education and maturation, is taking place elsewhere. UC first created, then cornered, its market share and will continue pushing its status quo until its market collapses. The pandemic, post-graduate underemployment and student debt are the trifecta to force such a reckoning. Until then, the Regents will continue churning out redundant and expensive product with no thought to the actual social costs to our community or to their student consumers.
The new old City/County task force and advisory group have hired an advocate, a cheerleader essentially, to rally locals against UCSC and to “organize students” to protest themselves, presumably. This is an election year, after all. The special irony of this replay comes courtesy of the pandemic. We here in Santa Cruz might be voting in a November election without UCSC students in attendance.