The French Revolution turned out to prove that freedom and equality were two different ideas – that conflicted. “Man is born free”, explains Rousseau at the start of The Social Contract (1762), a generation before Louis XVI lost his head, “and everywhere he is in chains.”[1] The question which I intend to explore here is: are we capable of a free intelligence today? My central purpose is to suggest that the West cultivates systems of control, notably through education, and I shall be discussing how universities have capitalized on the discourse of “diversity” and “inclusion”. Moreover, there appears to be a discontinuity between the academic critique of neo-liberalism and the exploits of their own institutions. I also hope in the process to indicate how ideas can cluster - and sometimes become claustrophobic.
Many tend
to depict the East, notably China – and perhaps rightly so, as historically
prone to despotism, given how President Xi mimics the Emperors preceding him. Clearly, a huge swath of the East Asian
population is controlled by political means: one party, one state, and lots of
propaganda, now aided by facial recognition technology, credit systems, of
course censorship, as well as regular anti-corruption purges, which is to say
nothing of Muslim Uyghurs, among others, interned in Xinjiang region. But political control is augmented by social
control which is exerted through the family. One finds in Confucianism a deep
respect for elders and ancestors, hence the Communist gerontocracy that
prevails despite the disruptive nature of state-capitalism which has modernized
the nation.
While the
East combines both political and social control, the West exercises less strict
political control but has more means of social control. The West relies less than the East on the
family per se to co-opt its citizens
into conformity, but it does have two essential tools. One tool is the religion of Disney, which is
the incarnation of the American Declaration of Independence’s “pursuit of Happiness.” While some Roman Catholics might go to the
Vatican - and many Muslims to Mecca, most North American families make at least
one pilgrimage to Disney. The religion of Disney is the West’s response to the
East’s Confucian respect for old people.
One does not find many seniors at amusement parks, Disney or otherwise.
The other
tool of social control is the West’s educational institutions, from
kindergarten to high school, and even at the university level. One might protest with indignation that the
East exerts control through its educational system, too, but I suggest this is
– or was – secondary to the family. It
is the Chinese family that encourages education, likely modelled on the example
of Confucius. Only relatively recently
is education truly a hot commodity in China, but often it is sought elsewhere:
in the USA, England, Canada, and Australia for example. The West euphemistically
exports its education, and with this overseas money it becomes a lucrative
business subsidizing our institutions, which are often public. The chief commodity, of course, are
science-based STEM degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels. But I ask: what are the hidden costs to the
life of the mind on today’s campuses as universities compete in markets for
prestige and international students?
The purpose
of education is well expressed metaphorically through Charlie Chaplin’s film “Modern
Times”, where the wheels of industry grind away at the individual, who becomes
a widget. Drilled in good habits for
life, often with ready-made lessons, today’s youth are prepared much like tins
of Campbell soup in submission to the inevitable ‘order of things’.[2] The goal is to indoctrinate, more simply to train,
to make ourselves useful and productive members of society. We are destined to be ‘specialists’ in the
vast machinery of life, trying to ‘fit in’ – yet without regard when our
efforts don’t ‘work’. To resort to
further metaphor, students experience a kind of treadmill effect, education is
as if on a conveyor belt, but those who see the ruse ‘drop out’. In local terms, consider the Sky Train
station serving Simon Fraser University’s main campus in Burnaby, B.C.,
unwittingly known as “Production Way”.
Teachers
have been churning out sausages ever since Dickens invented Mr. Gradgrind:
education must be controlled, for, as always, there’s an official ideology –
even today. Dickens offered a critique
of nineteenth-century English utilitarianism, the sterile nourishment of John
Stuart Mill’s early childhood, which resulted in the philosopher’s eventual breakdown.[3]
Broadly conceived, education is still to
this day based on social and economic utility; we have not escaped Dickens’
paradigm. Chapter Two of the First Book
in Hard Times is satirically
entitled: “Murdering the Innocents”, more applicable, some might think, to the disgraceful
legacy of the Indian Residential Schools. We see in Hard
Times children starved of imagination and acts of spontaneity. Dickens
laments how education (in the spirit of positivism) subjects children to hard
“facts” – yet he largely fails to comment on their lives in factories, or in the
mines.[4] His pen also omits the English universities
from any attack.[5] In any event, the opening scene of Hard Times, as in all of Dickens’ works,
is dramatic:
Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
Facts. Facts alone are wanted in
life. Plant nothing else and root out
everything else. You can only form the
minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service
to them. This is the principle on which
I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these
children. Stick to the Facts, sir![6]
Dickens
brings to mind the question: who teaches the teachers? His answer is Mr.
M’Choakumchild. If teaching is fraught with hard-nosed utility, then let’s not
have their educators thinking too freely.
Look, for example, at what happened to Socrates – the gadfly! The desire for ‘freedom’, found at the circus
in Dickens’ fictitious Coketown, situated in the industrial north, is today
best satisfied by Disney distractions, thoughts of Christmas candy cane, and
the Easter Bunny, as the West inhabits a child-centred universe.
By default,
education is primarily a middle-class activity; students of choice belong to
this same category, unless they are from overseas. If you look to Canada, we still have a mobile
middle class which forms the bulk of the population - and most often it assumes
positions of influence, though this appears not be the case in the USA, where
it is threatened and has been for some time.
Can our middle class be described as the stuff of leadership, bogged down
by mortgages, family, debt, inflation, maybe a vested interest in protecting property,
and an overloaded email inbox? The
legal profession best embodies this class – we see this in the constitutional
efforts of the French Revolution which established the first bourgeois notion of nationhood. But,
today, lawyers tend to amount to mere technicians of society, working clause-by-clause.
Sometimes they aspire for public office, thus aping their French revolutionary predecessors
yet lacking the same spirit of political innovation.[7]
If our
parliamentarians are not trained lawyers, then they tend to be thespians, who
may - or may not - have the edge on leadership, and among that crowded field
one finds Volodymyr Zelensky, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even
Nelson Mandela. There are exceptions,
however: Justin Trudeau suffers from being a thespian at the pinnacle of public
office while trained as a high school teacher.
Having an elite background, he nonetheless personifies shallow
leadership, while also exhibiting a very limited political vocabulary, the result
of social media saturation. His favourite stock of words are “terrorism” and
“genocide”.
Today we have
a new official ideology, promoted by politicians of poor repute, which in and
of itself is a remarkable fact of contemporary culture. Current buzzwords include
the terms “safe” and “inclusive”, which is implicitly gendered recalling – dare
I say – a soft, peaceful or agreeable view of the world, if you allow a comment
on a once traditional feminine stereotype.
The opposite idea of risk-taking and being disagreeable can be gendered
as well, albeit in the once traditional masculine sense. Is there such a thing now as too much concern
about safety? Is education in a
risk-free environment a good education? Are we doing our children - and
ourselves - a favour by arranging middle-class “play dates”? If we are always supervising our children’s
play time, how will they learn to solve problems by themselves? Is scheduling lives and mapping out
activities as if on a vast blueprint not consistent with Disney culture? As a result, are we being taught to “play
nice” at all stages of life after childhood?
Does this insistence on being “safe” not instead induce anxiety, because
from early on we never had dealings with the unpredictable – that is, people
you cannot plan away, like the Putins of this world? In some university courses being “safe” is even
organized to reduce “harm” by avoiding “triggers” (possibly a loaded metaphor),
but does this not inhibit growth that comes with risk taking, intellectual or
otherwise?
Another
buzzword is “diversity”, essentially a Romantic notion which returns us to
Rousseau, “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Romanticism wants to liberate difference; it also
wants to tell personal stories. Romanticism
emphasizes what is unique to humanity - as opposed to what is common, which is
Classical. It dwells on a culture of
‘the Other’ by celebrating (in a literal sense) colourful communities, or,
rather (in today’s terms), communities of colour, especially lives that are Black
and Indigenous. This focus on such
groups is not merely a matter of social justice. It can be understood as anti-hierarchical,
as it opposes the sense of ‘order’ which is rooted in the slave-owning legacy
of Greco-Roman control, in other words the Classical.
Historically-speaking,
justice was considered Classical: look to the Supreme Court buildings –
especially in the USA, but also Canada - where one finds apparent balance,
symmetry, and above all – order. Today Critical Race Theory, which emerged out
of a meaningful attack on the so-called colour-blind American legal system, has
become ubiquitous. Hence the terms “systemic racism” or “institutional racism”
are deemed to explain all things
including the inequities of the pandemic. It appears nowadays that even schizophrenia – decidedly
neither Classical, nor Romantic - is caused by racism, if you believe all you
read. Critical Race Theory in Canada has
married up with postcolonialism, which, too, is consistent with Romantic
principles, though events can be far removed from aesthetics. George Floyd’s
murder was viewed alongside the “news” of the unmarked graves found at the Kamploops
Residential School, which caused everyone to fall into a moral panic. It was as if the distance of time had
disappeared. Critical Race Theory has also come to replace Marxist class
analysis, which prioritized social conflict and the economic conditions of
living. Apparently the poor and working class are now forgotten as being
socially important, while criticizing Critical Race Theory becomes Verboten, unless you admire Trump, who
apparently ‘loves the poorly educated.’ Endorsing
Critical Race Theory is thus de rigueur
to identity politics. But is it not
one-dimensional, as was Marxist class struggle in its own day?
Instead of
considering people in terms of their socio-economic status, educational authorities
today - thanks to Critical Race Theory – promote race consciousness. Are we not then reducing a person to their
race? What about racialized minorities
who “pass for white?” How do they ‘fit
in’? White people can certainly be
racist - no question, but is racism an exclusively White social problem? Can people not face other barriers apart from
their racial or gender identity? To
avoid some of these issues, Critical Race Theory makes the argument that race
is “socially constructed”.[8] In other words, biological race is “false” even
though it is a real, lived experience.[9] Critical Race Theory also introduces the
notion of intersectionality; there is a structural relationship between race,
class, gender and other “systems” of privilege or discrimination. Not unlike
Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory argues there is no biological
basis to gender: it too is a social construct. All these theories look back to
Locke – fundamental to Rousseau – who made the case for a tabula rasa, of individual as a ‘blank slate’ at birth.
The idea of
the mind as a tabula rasa is a central
plank to the Enlightenment, wherein one also finds the scientific foundation to
‘modern’ thought – as articulated by Kant (an admirer of Rousseau), the self-professed
Copernicus of rationality. In “What is
the Enlightenment?” (1784) Kant articulates the “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all
matters” [his emphasis] which is the model for the university.[10]
Thus the declared mission of higher
education is to teach, inspire learning if not curiosity, and, above all, raise
critical consciousness. Note that Marxism
itself is rooted in the marriage of Enlightenment “freedom” with Darwinian
“struggle” under the rubric of “science”. Marx’s concept of class consciousness,
along with his other ideas, was once highly fashionable in university
curriculum but declined following the collapse of the Soviet Union. His thinking has not made much of a recovery,
at least among academic faculty.
This shift
reflects the development of other philosophical influences on higher learning,
for example, Existentialism and Postmodernism. The Existentialists are best
represented by Sartre who claimed “Man is nothing other than his own project”,
thus lending credence to the idea of individuals reinventing themselves, one
way or another.[11] Postmodernism, on the other hand, is
articulated by Foucault’s multiple power/knowledge analyses, but is it
self-reflective when it comes to academe? Inspired in part by the legacy of the
storming of the Bastille, Foucault speaks against prisons and hospitals as
institutions of confinement, but is not the university a kind of self-replicating,
bureaucratic institution of professionalized authority confined to the lucky
and select few?[12] If
our universities are supposed to exercise public reason – as Kant might have it
– then why is academia today (funded by provincial tax dollars in Canada)
reaping profits of enterprise by catering to overseas students, which so few
are want to criticize? Put another way: our
universities no longer seem to offer “public” education - or an education for
the “public” - because they are engrossed by investments in an international
clientele. This only adds momentum to
the preoccupation with the new official ideology and its lexicon. Universities consider themselves to be hotbeds
of controversy, but in my books they get a poor grade on diversity and
inclusion, which is a fallacy, because overseas students tend – from a social
perspective - to be mostly of one ‘class’, the privileged.
Hence I would like to suggest that universities practice, at best, “conditional inclusion”.[13] The question is: inclusive of whom? Conditional on what? If you can come up with the funds to pay for years of overseas tuition at a university in the West, you already rank as wealthy, or comfortable, or parents are willing to sacrifice everything for their child’s chance for a better life. Overall, overseas students tend to be the elite of their own nation, and those who cannot afford the fees stay home. One excludes by being exclusive, yet there is all this talk about inclusion. According to Times Higher Education, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver is ranked the most international university in North America. It is certainly not the poorest, and the same goes for much of the student body; we can tell from the brass doorknobs and the many new sleek glass structures. Ask yourself why many places of higher education in the West have recruitment officers stationed in China and India? Indeed one of the metrics for university ranking systems - certainly when looking at Canada’s standard guide, Maclean’s Magazine - is precisely how ‘international’ the student body is, yet these same universities depend on foreign students for the great majority of their funding. Here is the irony: the more money universities rake in from numbers of international students, the greater their ranking.
University
education in the West is a business interested in the metrics of economic
success and institutional self-perpetuation by means of graduate (read: widget)
output. I dare say it can also be
likened to neo-colonialism, but, thankfully, students are not arriving in
galleys of ships. Universities are
intent on selling their brand, while potential students – especially the ones
paying overseas fees – gain a form of protection by means of an improved social
status and better chances for life by means of an express route to permanent
residency in Canada. While on campus, though, these students also gain academic
leverage, for example, UBC has built and staffed an entire facility known as
Vantage College to teach overseas students whose English is not good enough for
first year. So goes a “public” first-tier research university. And when
assembled on campus, these students can represent vast solitudes, but do they actually
mix? Don’t expect a pot pourri of social or intellectual interaction. In other words, there is an exchange going
on, but it does not seem very cultural.
So to turn
a concept of its head, universities are themselves ‘systems’ of privilege which
one does not talk about while on campus. There almost appears to be a kind of double-standard:
the Sciences draw in the international students towards STEM degrees, while many
in the Humanities tend to critique neo-liberalism and pronounce on Critical
Race Theory or other ‘progressive’ ideas.
Clearly, the Sciences are driving the universities, because they are the
source of greater international student funding, while the Humanities, which
are in decline – certainly in terms of enrollment - suffer from diminished
confidence, a lessening of prestige, as well as a form of cognitive dissonance
given there is little or no critique of the implicit neo-liberalism operating
within university systems today. No one
wants to bite the hand that feeds them, so the Humanities do not venture to
criticize the Sciences on which university ‘success’ is nowadays built.
To sum up, if
Dickens were to write a story about today’s university, he would remark on how Santa
Claus would have a hard time finding his voice there, most certainly in
Canada. This is not just because he is
an old white man, or that demography somehow fails him. Neither is it because he figures in the Christmas
spirit while most universities are secular. It is because the idea of Santa
purports to represent some degree of public
good, a rather dated notion now, since society – and study - has become far
more “global”, as well as worldly, while universities apparently place a
primacy on research - not character. Today they adhere to a corporate agenda to
meet their mandate; the aim is to fill coffers from afar, then spread the
word on alleged diversity and inclusion. “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Hence, the modus operandi of contemporary academia, understood as a universal
good, is to invest in students from beyond any border, if they can pay, then
teach everybody to play nice. Best not
question the new order of things, whatever you do!
[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, tr. G.D.H. Cole, revised J.H. Brumfitt and John C. Hall (New York: Dent/Dutton/Everyman's Library, 1978), p. 165.
[2] The phrase “the order of things”
belongs to Foucault, also the title of his book (in English), but really a loose
translation of Les Mots et les choses. Montesquieu’s phrase is “the nature of
things”. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994).
See also the Preface in Montesquieu, The
Spirit of the Laws, tr. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Miller, Harold Samuel
Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) p. xliii.
[3] See
the Background Notes in Charles
Dickens, Hard Times: An Authoritative
Text, 2nd ed., ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1990), passim.
[4] George
Orwell, Selected Essays, ed. Stefan
Collini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 14.
[5] Ibid., p.
21.
[6] Dickens, Hard Times: An Authoritative Text, p. 7.
[7]
Georges Bernanos, The Great Cemeteries
Under the Moon (Providence, Rhode Island: Cluny, 2018), p. 31, passim.
[8] See
the Introduction to Kimberlé Grenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller,
and Kendall Thomas, Critical Race Theory:
The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995), p. xxvi.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss and T.R. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 55.
[11] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, tr. Carol
Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 37.
[12] See Conor Heaney, “Stupidity and Study in the Contemporary University”, La Deleuziana – Revue en ligne de Philosophie, No. 5, 2017, pp. 5-31. This excellent work emphasizes the “subordination of thought to calculation” - especially to market forces - which prevails today. See p. 8 ff.
[13] Ibid., p. 21.
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