I’ve attended a college and four universities, and have degrees from three of them. My experience with what is called education in the US is that it’s largely a wasteland of pretense, control, and pseudo-education consisting roughly of more terminology, illicitly borrowed references from other people’s work, and advancement by fakery. There are few institutions for which I have less respect – corporate life in general, religious life in general, and public education altogether, than “higher education”.
In the college where I had my first experience, a science intructor stood at the front of the class and made the absurd claim that “Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that whatever power controls the universe, whether you call it God or whatever, one day we will be able to harness that power”. When I questioned whether this was in fact what Einstein’s theory says at all, and whether what we were hearing was science at all, not only was questioning the enthralled class highly unpopular, but the only other man in the class threatened me with violence, the women all vacated the room and refused to return, and the administration arrived on the scene and tried to blame me for the class’ feelings of fear. Of course, I calmly explained that I’d be happy to involve an attorney, and we could go over exactly what happened in a public venue. This is how I knew Science would be a waste of my time.
At the same college, it was common place to decide that someone who’d never taught or studied a subject in his life could teach it, because after all, it’s all just ‘material’. So they’d throw an adjunct in psychology up suddenly to teach a full class on philosophy because, after all, aren’t they pretty similar? My first philosophy teacher read off a list of the philosophers from the syllabus on day one, and mispronounced roughly a third of them. It was the first time she’d ever encountered those names, of course. I made the mistake of correcting her, and the response was “who’s the teacher?” Apparently not desk-r-tez. When, at her suggestion, I tried to drop the class, they told me I couldn’t drop, I could only withdraw. I think it was something like’d they’d started the class two weeks late, having been unable to find an instructor. Again, I had to suggest we make it a legal issue and address the competence of the instructor in the subject matter. I managed to escape still interested in Philosophy.
Again, at the same college, I was awarded an A on a history book report, the grades were handed out to us to see, and then back to the instructor to record. When I received my paper for keeps, the A had been marked out and B added. The instructor had decided that he didn’t like the book I reviewed. When he’d approved it, he thought he was approving a different book with one word different in the title. I was actually proud of his stupidity, and kept both marks without challenging the change. I think that’s why one of the degrees I acquired was in History. When people are willing to punish you for accessing information they don’t like, you take pride in it.
Lastly, in English literature, we were told that *any* interpretation was valid if you could defend it. So I advanced a rather novel theory that Shakespeare’s ideas were influenced by Puritanism, and so accounted for much that occurs in his plays. The class and instructor found this so intriguing that she set the entire class upon the topic, asking me to defend the thesis. I successfully defended it against all comers, and earned an A in the class, clearly foremost among all participants. However, toward the end of the class, as we had moved past Shakespeare, I announced that I had continued doing research, and no longer held to my theory, because of some additional analysis I’d done. The analysis was not requested, but my standing grades were reversed, and I received a C in the class. Instead of being lauded for pursuing the subject with intellectual integrity, I was punished, and told that I’d “made up” the theory, and that I’d wasted the class’ time on something that “wasn’t true”. Since I had changed my thinking, I was told, they could change my grade. In fact, I was given to understand that an “F” for the class had been considered, but they were being merciful. This is how I decided not to be a Literature major.
There were good, useful, and helpful classes during this time, also. You might wonder that I didn’t quit. I have a remarkable tendency to keep pounding away at things when they’re difficult, unjust, and fruitless. Probably a result of surviving my childhood. But certain instructors encouraged me and gave me life-changing information. So that certainly made it easier, and I kept the ideal of education alive.
I started at a university studying special education, and made it pretty far. At one point, though, the most respected faculty member, and certainly the most rigorous, made the statement that “the special ed teacher lives in a world of deprivation”. He went on to explain the relatively short cycle of people staying in the profession – from graduation to burnout. And I knew that it was no longer for me. More deprivation was not what I was seeking. I switched to History and academics shortly thereafter.
One of the universities I attended (and got a degree from) was a traditionally black university. The campus was dominated by an instructor who treated himself like the Phil Donahue of black studies. His courses were required. He started classes talking about threats he received from the Klan. The garbage put forth in those classes was unparalleled. The worst kind of pseudo-scholarship. We had class discussions on whether Adam and Eve were black, and about lost cities of advanced stature, hidden from history by the white man. When I complained to the administration, the adminstrator of the college talked to me of underwater cities built by technologically advanced, ancient black people. A colleague and I were so taken aback by this silliness, that we went so far as to contact a naval base and ask what research had been done on this. The researcher who posed the question to her colleagues was so embarrassed by the response (basically, ‘are you nuts?’) that we were asked not to send any further research questions. It was worth it to be thorough in ruling out the insanity. Recordings of that conversation and those classes still exist. I decided the only way to do history, which was my degree program at the time, was to do an expose of the sources of such nonsense and the truth in refutation of those claims. That’s exactly what I did, discovering that some of their primary “research sources” which they sold in the unofficial campus ‘world studies’ bookstore, included texts dictated by magical apparations (C.F. Volney’s Ruins of Empires, for instance). Needless to say my popularity with the core instructor shlepping out that hooey and his wide following among the student body was nil – there were death threats. I was told if there were any violent incidents of ‘black rage’ in response to my inquries, I would be held accountable. I had to go armed to class a few times, because really there was no other choice. Walking to my car required an escort once or twice, and that was just for asking questions about whether any of this stuff was really history.That experience was one of the reasons I decided not to take a teaching credential along with history – staying another year just wasn’t worth it – but I decided to go to graduate school instead.
Again, as an undergraduate, I had some classes that were really worthwhile. I wish the people claiming Moses was a black man would have taken them, though I gathered from their lack of interest in real research, they would have found them quite difficult to pass. Enough people did who weren’t absorbed in UFO versions of history. In fact, though, a couple of those instructors really ensured that I got an education – something that wouldn’t happen again. I studied philosophy and history and historiography with them and it was what sustained me while dealing with magic and mythology in my “black studies” classes – if you can call them classes. They were more like rampant morning talk shows with lots of calling everyone and everything racist, and lots of esoteric ’secret knowledge’ that couldn’t, apparently, stand the light of scrutiny. Pamphlets disguised as textbooks, a cult-like preacher of insanity disguised as an instructor, and docile, bewildered, indoctrinated administration unable to tell scholarship from kooky versions of theosophy adapted from nazi sources for use, ironically in an afrocentric program of credit-bestowing, degree-granting nonsense. How many people got their credentials, and still do, in such an environment? It’s one of the main reasons that neither grades nor degrees impress me at all, or represent achievement to me at all. Whether it’s this, or harnassing the power of “god”, or studying ‘desk-r-tez’.
My first experience with graduate school involved the fact that it was on a campus that also offered undergraduate “education”. I decided to study a foreign language, which put me among mostly under-grads. The instructor was … wow. One time I broke ranks and gave a more involved (in the other language) response to his greeting (instead of just being the 20th person to repeat the same thing), and he publicly dressed me down for it – for weeks, every class – I became his running example of the unacceptable – I had done more than was required. Then I discovered that a couple of the instructors in the department were extremely antagonistic toward my religion, which they associated with an ethnicity they didn’t like. I know this because one of them stood in the hallway telling me in animated terms of her “hatred” (yes, she used the word repeatedly) for my faith and that ethnic group. After being made a public ‘example’ of, on an ongoing basis in the language class and even at international student functions, I found myself before the administration again, when I complained and asked to drop mid-semester (it took me a while to realize what psychopaths these were). They threatened to expel me, of course, and I did the usual – I offered to have my attorneys represent me as we went through the process, while our team did research on the sources of ethnic and religious discrimination among the faculty. I was allowed to drop.
I took a special seminar, or was awarded entrance to it, because it was competitive and not everyone was allowed to participate. My credentials were good, and I wasn’t yet known there as a troublemaker. I remember that I was making a point using nanotechnology as a reference in 1996 and, to the amusement of the class, a colleague said I’d been reading too much sci-fi – that nanotechnology didn’t exist. When I pointed out that the nanotech program at M.I.T. had just a few years before graduated it’s first PhD. in the topic, they were unphased. When I pointed out that Scientific American and public affairs journals were running articles on this all the time, my colleagues advised me that not everything in print is true. What I quickly realized is that a thing is not true among academics unless they have heard of it directly from someone they regard as an authority figure. Each of those people now, for some reason, understand that nanotechnology is and has been and was then) a serious branch of science. But I was a kook because, while I didn’t believe in “black Atlantis” I had access to information they hadn’t been spoon-fed. It was a useful lesson in what academia really is, and how it works. Offers to march them to the library and let them choose any sources they wanted from a bibliography search had no impact. A thing could not be real unless a professor told you it was real. And if a professor told you something completely made up, you were a kook if you didn’t believe it.
I could remember a former friend of mine who once said to me, that something “is not true, because it would be too important if it were. And if it were important, my instructors in school would have told me about it.” I could remember a family member who told me that something (some technological information) is something I don’t know because “I work in this field, I know more than you, and I don’t know it – therefore you don’t know it.” I was seeing that these attitudes were not isolated – they were the norm. It was just a year before, in undergraduate life, that a friend of mine was given an assignment to write about three leaders and what they had in common. He chose three heads of state. His “A” was marked out and a “B” put in its place because he had used examples that weren’t in the textbook. The instructor wrote on the cover of his essay that he had “brought in outside sources”. He was warned that if he continued to do so, he would forfeit his entire grade and possibly be removed from the class. A society of academics we founded – in secret, because genuine academics were persecuted – gave the instructor an award for that one. The Latin on the certificate, slid under the door, and proudly displayed for some time by the instructor, said “with his arse, he made a trumpet”. It was the least we could do.
Graduate school was less of a zoo, but still utterly pathetic. Right away, the teaching assistants – which were the plum positions to get as a grad student – informed me that the way to survive was do the instructors’ research for them, never color outside the lines – follow the wide path – don’t strike out on your own and do controversial or new research. Especially, don’t do any research that embarrasses any faculty, or meets with disapproval by anyone, because you might need them on your dissertation committee. When I asked what I could expect in return, I was told a faculty position, after graduation, at some rural college for some years. That’s the best I could hope for, because degrees were plentiful and relevant jobs few. I knew at that moment, I was not cut out for the field, but I stuck with it a while. The other avenue of course was CIA recruitment on campus. They always had some well-placed teachers to spot prospects and you could get in pretty easily if you spoke enough of the right languages. Of course, you had to be OK with invading other countries and bombing villages.
I found that, in grad seminars, as I asked questions about all the built in assumptions I was seeing, how in everything something was assumed that hadn’t been established at all, people found it strange and alien. One professor suggested I pursue a degree in Divinity somewhere, because I was interested in first things. But, he said, we have to assume a lot of things in order to do what we do, otherwise we can’t do it. I found that odd, that the goal of being academic was more important than whether or not any of it were actually real. I began to realize that academia is not where I belonged, either. It was one thing to stomach a constant ration of academic politics that punish brilliance (deviance) and reward mediocrity – or even to stomach it in exchange for a crappy job that no one wants – but to do it and not even believe in the crap you’re dealing is just too much.
I travelled and worked instead. I flirted with library science most briefly, as a return to grad school, but I was making money without academia – it seemed that I didn’t need them. I later returned and got a grad degree through distance learning – at least I didn’t have to deal with some of the nutjobs and the stupid, useless administration. That’s where it really was driven home how much plagiarism is traded for grades and credentials. I’d say 50% of the student work I saw being passed through the system was not only plagiarized, but quite demonstrably so. I know – I put together a report on it, with documented examples – and the university basically just shrugged and said it can’t follow up on every case – which means it wasn’t going to follow up on any of them. I took my degree, and I know I did 100% real work to earn it, but effectively I regard it as a scrap of paper. I was bound for corporate life, and if corporations wanted to pay more for it, I’d hand in that ticket. It’s a deal corporations make with academia – not to produce something of substance – just to produce something that excuses the corporation when failures occur, and gives the illusion of qualifications, due diligence, and a basis for hiring, advancement, salary levels, etc. It’s all an illusion, just like those underwater cities.
When I knew I’d be leaving corporate life, I realized that the degrees I have aren’t tickets to anything outside of corporate life. Nothing. This further reinforced my understanding of degrees as mere corporate passes. You get the stamp, you get it punched, and you get a slot as a cog in an engine. And if you’re OK with that, and that’s one of the major goals in your life, you might as well plagiarize, right? If that were my goal, I never would have set foot on a campus. Distance learning isn’t new – it’s been around since the sixties – accredited degrees, I’m talking about. Paying for the fake ones when you can just fake your way through school and get government to subsidize it is stupid. You see, it’s a collaboration between government, academia, and corporations. It’s the entire apparatus at work in the “education” business – which has, as its end, not education but placement. It is the societal engine for placing people in the slots most useful to sustaining the existing machinery. If you saw City of Ember and thought it was far-fetched – no – that’s exactly how we work already. And it might as well be run by Bill Murray’s character – it is that absurd.
People that know me consider me an ‘educated’ person. I’ve got a library of 15,000 books. A lot of people consider me “well-read”, which should account for my brilliance. Actually, though, I haven’t read them all, but I can summarize the thesis, or offer rough excerpts from most of them. I know that’s not the same as real education, because I know educated people. People who, like Will in Good Will Hunting, did their own research. After a couple of decades in academic pursuits, I look up at the certificates on my walls, and they don’t mean anything to me. I don’t find it tragic to think so. I do find it tragic that anyone wastes so much effort and endures so much insanity and receives very little intrinsic value. I value a few of the instructors and a few of the classes. But those instructors would, in most cases, have given me my education without attending college. I liken the experience of a college and four universities, most closely, to being a member of a succession of religious cults. The shady and dishonest pastor characters are there. The lackeys and opportunists fill the student body. The adminstration are making their living off of an institution that hoodwinks people. The thing has special tax status. And membership conveys a certain respectability in circles that can help you “advance”, if you’re willing to be or become what they are ‘advancing’ you to.
In short, I put the education I pursued in the same category in which I put most of the dating I did as a young man, and most of the religious groups I joined. It was all a colossal waste of time, money, and attention designed to siphon off brilliance and creativity and divert it to activities of dissipation. Moreover, I have about as little respect for academic institutions in general as I do for most of the girls I dated (a lot of them were just contemptible human beings) and the religious groups I participated in (sham artists, in some degree, all of them). You can add to that my participation in politics (same issues) and corporate life (the worst – the meaning, end, outcome, and intent of most of those ‘relationships’, religious endeavours, and political activities, as well as ‘education’). I fault my parents for not preparing me better. They were cogs in the machine, and they raised me to be a cog. It just didn’t take, and it took a very long time to unlearn all the things you absorb at a vulnerable age. I have unlearned most of them and that education, not the pseudo-education of the universities, colleges, and schools, is the one that has been most valuable to me in my life. Maybe i have 60% plus of my life left – more I hope – to really make use of unlearning, and the new things I’ve learned and am learning, but I think it’s better than finding out later than that. I notice people who know it’s a sham late in life, and won’t turn to get off the train, because they’ve got so much invested in it and think it’s too late. I don’t dismiss that – I understand it – but I agree with Ayn Rand that it’s never too late to turn from what isn’t life to what is – you start from where you are – and what you have left is yours, not theirs. By God’s mercy, I’ve been granted a reprieve while I still have some life left, and ideally quite a bit. Even one breath of life, after all that non-life though, is worth it. Completely worth it
When my office moves, the degrees will go in a file, and not back up on the wall. Who knows, maybe they’ll have some kind of advertising pseudo value for the deluded somewhere down the road, but I doubt it. I’ll be retiring them the same way I’ve retired the resume, and for the same reasons. The same reason I quit dating when I was younger. The same reason my relationship with religion is cautious – genuine – but cautious. My identity is not wrapped up in these things anymore. My Faith is good, when it’s good, and I don’t go near it when it’s not being good. I’m out of the relationship circuit. I work for myself. And, as I said, a degree has no real value in most cases if you do that – only when you need it to get a license, and my profession doesn’t bother with licensing yet, though like everything else, I’m sure they’ll probably do that in the future. We’re mostly rogues, renegades, and free agents in the meantime. You get less quality out of some, but we get left alone mostly, too.
So that’s it. That’s what I have to say about ‘higher education’, or what passes for it.
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