But what I wanted to write about, briefly, was a little exchange I discovered in Critical Inquiry from 1999 between Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian, and Nicholas Royle, an English literature professor. The year before, LaCapra had written a fairly critical response to Bill Readings’ well-known 1996 book, The University in Ruins. In his earlier 1998 essay, LaCapra notes that Readings’ claims of “ruin” are hyperbole, and he goes on to make some very sensible points about Readings’ tacit theory of institutions and his forms of evidence. Here’s a typical passage:

Readings’s very understanding of institutions is largely conceptual rather than oriented to institutions as historically variable sets of practices relating groups of people. His perspective on the institution and what he considers institutionally relevant thus seems very high-altitude in nature. In this approach… Readings relies not on studies of the institutional functioning of universities but on a decontextualized reading of such figures as Kant, Humboldt, Arnold, and Newman. These figures did elaborate paradigms or normative models, at times embodying critical and self-critical elements, and these models may have had a problematic relation to institutional practice that varied over space and time. But what that relation was, including the differences between model and practice, is not immediately obvious. (1998:38)

This strikes me as wise methodological advice for anyone who wants to understand what a university is and how “the university” relates to the various ideas that actors have about it. LaCapra argues, in short, that one has to look at the relations, gaps, tensions, between discourse and practice. But what strikes me as hilarious, and what drives me to write this blog post, is how Royle writes in his response to LaCapra the year after. In short, Royle gives a flawless performance of what I recognize, from essays I read in college, as stock deconstructive rhetoric. Here’s the start of Royle’s essay:

In his extremely measured and seemingly even-handed essay, Dominick LaCapra recalls Jacques Derrida’s well-known (though still perhaps inconceivable) proposition that “one must begin where one is” (p. 50).[1] He does not recall the more difficult and disconcerting supplement that accompanies it, that is to say “Wherever we are: in a text already where we believe ourselves to be” (“Quelque part où nous sommes: en un texte déjà où nous croyons être”).[2] To be already in a text, that is to say, in a context, is to be in ruins.[3] It is to have to reckon with a thinking and an affirmation of ruination at the origin. As Derrida has observed: “In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration.”[4] An affirmation of this experience of ruination is, as Derrida says, “experience itself”: the ruin “is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything.”[5]

How do you feel about this passage? Yes, I’m serious. I want to hear your reactions. But since, alas, I can’t find out without finishing this post first, I’ll start by telling you some things that strike me about this passage.

1. It starts out with utter sarcasm about LaCapra’s text; seemingly even-handed is basically academese for ridiculously unfair.
2. Derrida is cast in a very strange way: as at once a sort of nearby interlocutor, someone who needs no introduction and whose propositions are “well-known,” but also as an absolute authority whose (in fact controversial) claims can be cited as if they were self-evident truths.
3. It’s unclear why it would be an inconceivable proposition to “begin where one is,” and Royle makes no effort to explain what he means.
4. Moving on to the second sentence… I note that being “more difficult and disconcerting” is cast as an obviously good thing.
5. In passing, this is an incredibly scholastic bit of prose: every sentence ends in a footnote.
6. Royle cites Derrida to the effect that we are (presumably always and everywhere) “in a text already.” (He also quotes the French original to no apparent purpose.)
7. He needs to assert that we’re already in a text so that he can then claim, in the third sentence, that texts are themselves contexts. If there is nothing outside the text (are we far enough into the Derridean ritual incantations yet?) then, presumably, LaCapra’s “differences between model and practice” don’t exist, or at best can only be rephrased as mere differences between one text and the next.
8. Having claimed that contexts are themselves texts, Royle can then present us with the fantastic metaphor, presented however as a seemingly literal claim, that being in a text is already being in ruins. My point here isn’t that we ought to strive for non-metaphorical thought — anyone who believes that should try reading George Lakoff — but rather that Royle fails to acknowledge the metaphorical status of his own claim.
9. (Incidentally, I observe that Royle has casually slipped from Derrida’s voice to his own, blending one with the next.)
10. In sum, Royle’s initial retort to LaCapra’s paper appears to be something like this: If all being involves being in a text, which involves being in a context, which is itself a text, and all being in a text involves being in ruins, then Readings can’t be accused of hyperbole in claiming that the university is in ruins. For we’re all always already in ruins.
11. I’m tempted to point out that Royle himself is appallingly hyperbolic here, but as it turns out later in the essay, Royle is already well aware of his own hyperbole. I won’t quote the whole passage, but he tries to avoid the patent hypocrisy of his hyperbolic reaction to (what he views as) LaCapra’s hyperbolic reaction to Readings’ hyperbole by asserting, feebly, that “there is hyperbole… we could say, as soon as there is text” (fn. 11). Royle, of course, makes no effort to substantiate this sweeping statement.
12. If we go on to read the last few sentences of the passage I quoted, we get a sense of the way that this Derridean language seems to constitute a limited, abstract literary cosmos, one which seems to have a strong aesthetic appeal for writers like Royle. A Derridean utterance like “At the origin comes ruin” certainly sounds mysterious; it has the patter of poetry; but it becomes a blunt form of thought, an intellectual anaesthetic that blocks us from distinguishing different origins and different ruins. There’s something Pavlovian about it, come to think of it: it’s as if, every time anyone uttered the word “ruins,” Royle were obliged to respond by citing Derrida to the effect that we’re already ruined. As if Derridean language makes its intellectual world less by persuasion or dialogue with its critics than through sheer force of repetition. A sad fate for a intellectual project that often wanted to be more discriminating, to read more carefully, than any other.
13. Just to pick out one last quality of this Derridean style, I’m struck by the casual reference to something like “experience itself,” which apparently can be entirely defined (by Royle) as “an affirmation of this experience of ruination.” Really, all experience is an experience of ruination? This is a kind of writing that talks freely about extremely abstract entities and takes pleasure in giving lots of paradoxical definitions, but it’s simultaneously theoretically committed to the impossibility of ever defining anything. It’s a theoretical language that revels in its own paradoxes.

Now, LaCapra obviously was seriously annoyed by Royle’s critique (which went on for several pages). His 1999 response to Royle is one of the more witheringly comic bits of academic prose I’ve read in a while; it has moments like these:

I would begin by noting the seeming condescension in his tone of the initiate. This tone has become familiar in a certain discourse that seems to situate itself both textually and contextually somewhere between meta-metaphysical hyperspace and Planet Earth (conceived of course in appropriately global terms). This labile (non)position of the Luftmensch allows for rapid gliding between quasi-transcendental critique and historical (or pseudohistorical) commentary.

[In response to an argument that LaCapra is US-centric:] If Royle really has something to say about other university systems that would contradict or qualify my argument, it would have been enlightening for him to have said it.

[In response to Readings's and Royle's advocacy of short-term, non-institutionalized structures:] A university made up only of self-styled anti-institutional institutions of short duration could be the realization of the superbureaucratic, transnational manager’s wildest dream—the ideal place for the blissful rendez-vous of such an apparatchik with the Deleuzian nomad following a ligne de fuite.

[In response to a claim that LaCapra ignores students:] Royle asserts that “in a sense, students do not exist” (p. 152). I shall resist the invitation to sustained irony this formulation holds out and simply observe that in another sense they do indeed exist.

[In conclusion:] Readings’s book was striving for something while Royle at times seems to equate thought (or is it Thought?) with rather predictable, in any case “undisconcerting” and histrionic, verbal gestures.

So in the end it doesn’t appear that Royle managed to persuade his opponent of anything of substance. Instead, he managed to call attention to his own textual performance. But for me, this whole exchange elicits above all a feeling of the rapid passage of time in academia. It strikes me that I very seldom see anything from the last ten years written in the Roylean style — that style where Derrida is a vast authority yet close at hand, where certain kinds of universal claims (for instance about “experience itself”) combine so readily with a fixation on the irreducibility and undecidability of texts, where a certain form of in-group irony passed for the height of intellectual sophistication. I don’t even know if most grad students my age have encountered this Derridean style — it was a staple of undergrad literary theory education when I was in college, but that was a while ago and may have been particular to my undergrad institution. At any rate, it’s not a style I’ve really encountered in the humanities at Chicago where I am now (though admittedly I’m not in a humanities department). Does anyone else get the sense that this sort of deconstructive writing is now slipping away into the archives?

By contrast, you could rent a room in Paris for an entire month (my rent is €400) for less than the sum cost of these three days. Yes, a month’s rent: which, from a student perspective, is a rather amazing sum of money. It’s enough to make one think that major academic conferences like this are structured around a sort of tacit class exclusion. They do, of course, have some participant funding available, but it apparently comes to €20,000 for a conference that’s supposed to attract more than a thousand people.

This happened in 1860 in Aberdeen. The students wanted Sir Andrew Leith Hay, the ‘local candidate’, and there was in fact a numerical majority for him, since the numbers in the ‘nation’ which comprised the Aberdeen constituency were greater than those in the ‘nations’ which came from outside Aberdeen. Reckoned by ‘nations’ and not by numbers, there was a tie between Hay and Maitland, the solicitor-general. The principal gave a casting vote in favor of Maitland. This was taken as a deliberate move to back the professors against the students. In March 1861 Maitland came to deliver his rectorial address. The academic profession, along with the magistrates and the town council, entered the hall. Cheering, hooting and yelling greeted their appearance; this was to be expected: it was the traditional accompaniment to every rectorial address. But then the scene became ugly. Chunks of splintered wood hurtled across the hall. The audience were, of course, expected to come unarmed, but some of them had brought in hammers and other instruments with which they uprooted the seats and smashed them into pieces suitable for projectiles.

The principal took his place at the rostrum and called on the meeting to join him in prayer. Out of respect for the kirk there was a temporary lull. But the uproar resumed as soon as the oath was administered to Maitland, and he stood at the lectern to give his address. At this point some of the professors left the platform ‘to remonstrate personally with those taking a leading part in the row’.The rector kept smiling and endeavoured to proceed with his address, but at this stage blood was trickling down his face. The more respectable students were ashamed, and added to the pandemonium by hissing. There were cries of ‘Call in the police’. After ineffectual intervention by the principal, several police were ‘brought up to the hall door, but no force was used by them. . . ‘. The rector calmly and impressively completed his oration, the principal pronounced a benediction, and the proceedings, ‘which had lasted upwards of two hours’, were brought to a close. (20-21)

I’d like to imagine that these days outright violence is no longer a part of university politics, but there are just too many counterexamples to take that claim seriously.

For example, consider the metro station that I was talking about in my previous post.

As the train approaches on the far track, a decent thicket of people accumulate on the facing platform. They face every which way. They form a long line with denser and emptier patches. They jockey for position on the platform or traverse it aimlessly.

The train inevitably pulls into the station.

After which it inevitably leaves.

And after it departs, the crowd is erased as if a rolling eraser had been wiped along the platform leaving nothing but a few stray bodies where formerly there was a horde.

Needless to say, my point here isn’t to be naive and pretend that something magical happens when a bunch of people get on a train. My point, however, is that at a sheerly visual level it’s quite a strange phenomenon. Visually, the people just vanish. Are effaced with the roar of the clattering wheels.

Not to mention that the social situation in the station is transformed in a matter of moments. Suddenly there’s solitude. The initial sense of getting scratched up by the thorns of a thicket of a crowd’s anonymous gazes gets replaced by an almost peaceful loneliness. One feels the absence of that curious mass expectation that always mounts up as a train approaches; all there is, instead, is a handful of plaintive souls hastening to climb back up the stairs to the street level. The large group that formerly waited together for the train in a mass demonstration of collective purpose gets replaced by a cluttered mass of individuals who immediately go off in separate directions.

This phenomenon occurs, repeats, repeats, repeats again. The light shifts on the arched roof of the station and shifts again, as the crowd casts shadows and the train catches the light. But you don’t see that, because your own train has probably arrived before you can observe many trains pass on the opposite track.

On the metro, there are further surrealisms that everyone ignores for the greater glory of the cause of minding their own business. Lights and lost spaces streak by in the tunnel. Hisses and roars and sometimes the smell of anomalous chemicals, like the intense smell of sulphur just north of Carrefour Pleyel in St-Ouen, come and go without comment.

It’s enough to make me feel that there needs to be some sort of theory of mass inattention to the mysterious. A theory of the regimentation and sterilization of urban perception. A theory of the way things become mundane.

(Photo by Imen I., a student in sociological methods at Paris-8.)

The title at the top reads “Some people are pretending that students don’t have housing problems.” The caption in blue on the photo says that “Damien and Mélanie, 22 and 23 years old, each still live with their parents.” You can’t really read the bottom, but it informs you that UNEF, the biggest student union in France, demands students’ right to housing. (Relevant background information: there’s a major shortage of dedicated student housing in the Paris area.)

This poster has, as far as I’ve seen so far, tended to shock and irritate campus-dwellers more than it attracts support for its ostensible cause. It depicts a young couple having sex in a parental bed while the parents are sleeping. The couple is similar, they both look pale-skinned, they both have dark hair, they’re both equally nude. The sex is hetero although, since the girl is on top, it is slightly less normative than it might be. I don’t really have a good point of cultural reference here, but for lack of anything better, French wikipedia claims that “La plus courante est la position du missionnaire.” Anyway, the boy’s body is stretched out on the bed and he’s gripping his partner’s head and thigh with his hands; the girl seems to be holding herself up with her left arm. It looks like they’re kissing, and the boy’s eyes are shut. I hope he hasn’t fallen asleep.

The parents are sleeping. Or are they? The old man’s sleep mask hints that it takes an effort to stay unconscious. The parents are turned away from the middle of the bed as if trying not to pay attention, trying not to know; if this were a real scene, they would at best be pretending to be asleep. They’re wearing nightclothes that blend into the bedding, as if symbolically they were only the unwanted backdrop to the sexual act in progress, to the young couple’s bodies that, compared to the rest of the bed, are so much more visible and so much more saturated with color. The bodies of the young couple seem to be physically right up against the bodies of the old couple, the girl’s right side fitted into the curve of the old man’s curled-up body, the boy’s shoulder possibly propped up on the old woman’s back. But at the same time, the bedding (that garish quilt) seems to act as a physical and, by implication, a symbolic barrier between the young and the old couple. It seems to maintain a minimum of physical separation even as the whole scene emphasizes the reckless and scandalous closeness of the children’s sex act to the parental bed. Taboos are being broken in this image, but only within limits.

The image is organized in such a way as to manifest a series of oppositions between the two couples:

The bodies of the young couple serve here to divide the old couple from each other. Here the young mediate and interrupt the old: symbolically, this looks something like an allegory of the way that children’s sexual relations interfere with their elders’ relationships, of the way that inter-family sexual relations interrupt intra-family (kin) ties. One of these young people is presumably the child of the sleeping parents; but here this person, whichever it is, is represented not as the child but as a member of a new couple opposed and probably annoying to their elders.

At the same time, it has to be said that both couples are obviously very similar in some ways. They both look white. They both look straight. And although only the young couple is having sex in this picture, we can infer that the old couple was, at a previous time, also having sex, since we can assume that that would have been the social and biological origin of one member of the young couple. In that light, the old couple should perhaps be viewed as “post-sexual” more than “asexual,” as the sleepy remainder of past scenes of sexual passion. It comes to mind that the only thing really taboo about this scene as a social situation is that the young couple is in the same bed as the parents. Aside from that, it’s a textbook image of hetero sociosexual reproduction. One couple produces a child who forms a new couple which in turn strives to produce a new child… That’s about as normative as it gets, on my understanding of French social order.

Now, although it seems to me that everything I’ve just said about the image is basically obvious, is basically something that one can read in the image without a great deal of interpretive risk, it must be said that, to the best of my knowledge, none of these considerations figure in local interpretation of the poster where this image appears. No one I’ve met sees this as a picture that deeply invokes norms and scripts of social reproduction; my sense is that local interpretations start and end with a scandalized sense that it’s a picture of a couple having sex. The depiction of sex — at least in the fairly unrelated context of a student housing campaign — is viewed as a scandal in itself, end of thought. Or perhaps just as a tasteless bit of political advertising. Someone told me: maybe this would make sense for a condom ad, but here!?…

The implicit logic of the poster, of course, is something like: “for lack of adequate student housing, students have to live at home; thus they have nowhere to have sex but their parents’ bed; which is absurd and scandalous; hence the current housing shortage leads to scandal and demands action.” It’s a logic of political shock, quite likely designed to catch the eye and stick in memory more than to elicit any direct political action. And insofar as it has indeed caught the eyes of the campus (a long row of these posters is put up in a series by the solitary university entrance), it seems to be, paradoxically enough, a success. The scandal represented in the image becomes the scandal of the image itself.

Actors in masks, some with stockings over their heads, made a pretend argument for burning the university. For the foreigners in the audience, a disjointed translation of their performance was projected on a screen like so:

We want Godard, Proust, the Princess of Cleves, not commercial trash culture

Let us burn the university! No! The University is not for profit! It is there to create more freedom, more riches (that are not material), “Latin is useless and that’s why it’s beautiful!” against the death of “dead languages”, let us burn the university! In the name of all erasmus students, I would like to say I had no time to write a speech, because I work to pay my way and so we say “let us burn the university”!

[They shouted their discourse from the stage.]

Experiment time! First we will build a fire, the first spark. Take your sheet of paper, fold it over, then again, and cut it, and lick it and keep your strip of paper (etc),

[The actors circled back into the aisles of the large lecture hall with sheets of paper, with which they mimed an effort to create fire.]

It doesn’t work!!!!!

[—they said as they pretended to discover that rubbing two pieces of paper together doesn't make a spark.]

It would be crazy; it would be like killing oneself; like putting one’s head in the freezer, like throwing oneself under a car, like…

[As if they were delighted to discover that they didn't need to burn the university after all... but the translation trailed off and the actors came through the aisles hugging the audience. Even including the ethnographer, yours truly.]

The more serious debate went on with a panel discussion.

However, among the panelists was the university president. And every time he opened his mouth to speak, people in the audience booed and hissed. He waited for them to finish; the moderator made failed pleas for civility; he spoke some more; his face became agitated.

In essence, his speech was a failure, blocked by the crowd. “By anarchists,” someone claimed later. He didn’t stay to the end of the debate, leaving by the side door soon after his (interrupted) speech had come to an end.

One of the other people talking was a representative of a squatter campaign. He explained to us that squatting had the advantages of being exciting and rent-free, but that, of course, there were “strong chances of legal trouble”… at any rate, I was interested in his negative comments on traditional protest forms. “Internships mean that corporations use young graduates for months and then dump them instead of hiring them. This will be your future if you don’t resist. New forms of protest must be invented against the Thatcher-like governments that resist “traditional” protests by waiting them out.”

And this has indeed been one of the common remarks about last spring’s university protests: that traditional protest forms (i.e., street marches) seem ineffective against a government that can simply ignore them.

Now looking back up into the auditorium, we can see one of the protestors standing up. He was shouting about the undemocratic format of the event and about how the voice of the audience had been excluded. The original format dictated that panelists spoke first, followed by “invited” audience comments, and finally general comments. That fell apart when the “general” audience wanted to speak sooner: after the speech you see pictured here, the event never returned to the sedate form of a well-groomed public event. Rather it hissed permanently with the noise of loud conversations among the audience, it hissed with interruption, it hissed with anger and incoherence.

Incidentally, it doesn’t look like such a large crowd in this photo, but there may have been a couple of hundred people there all told.

A number of foreign activists were present. At the end, an Austrian fellow took the stage to give a sweeping critique of the chaos of the event and to express a general sense of disappointment. He was speaking English, so the translation was into French. I’ll translate back:

We cannot simply talk about politics, we must act! It is a matter of respect not to insult others during the debate; we’ve gotten results at the end of six weeks of occupation of our university. The presidents of the university and of the region were obliged to negotiate with us. I’ve been surprised to see that this debate has been so philosophically oriented… and not adequately pragmatic. We’ve come a very long distance to bring you ideas and not to talk about philo[sophy]! Let’s move on!

Since I’m interested in the relationship between philosophy and politics, this last remark interests me. It seems to say: philosophical discussions are antipolitics. Philosophy discussions are a withdrawal from action. Philosophy is mere metadiscourse.

A minute later, someone, perhaps the protestors in the audience, set off firecrackers in the auditorium. Naturally, everyone jumped up out of their seats. (Including me.) We waited anxiously to see what would happen; another little explosion went off, even louder than the first. The crowd became muddled and people started to walk out. The security personnel showed up on the stage and waited outside in force. Someone made a half-hearted proposal to “occupy” the Sorbonne but I don’t think it got anywhere. At any rate, I got out of there and went home, not even stopping like a good ethnographer to survey other participants on their reactions.

Now I could tell you all sorts of other things about how my home university, a very rich private American university, is different from the French public universities I’ve encountered. But I’ve looked up some figures and, frankly, the sheer quantitative difference between Paris-8 and UChicago is so enormous that it almost speaks for itself. Behold:

As you can see, there are actually 6,338 more students enrolled at Paris-8 than at the University of Chicago. However, the balance tips the other way for every other indicator. In Chicago there are twice as many faculty (for fewer students), twenty times as many staff, and seventeen times more campus buildings — which is probably an underestimate, since UChicago also owns a lot of residential and commercial real estate in its neighborhood over and above the campus buildings. UChicago’s annual budget of $2.8 billion is also about seventeen times larger than that of Saint-Denis, and of course, UChicago controls an endowment of 4+ billion dollars while Paris-8 has an endowment of, as far as I know, zero. (French universities don’t have endowments; and much of their funding is dispersed directly by the ministry, though that’s changing as a result of contested “autonomy” protocols being put in place. The Chicago endowment on the other hand used to be $6.6 billion, though they claim it shrunk as much as 30% during last year’s economic crisis.) At any rate, I think the overall picture here is clear: the disparity in organizational wealth is enormous. The disparity in teacher-student ratios is obvious. The disparity in staff, money and buildings is even more obvious. This isn’t, in short, just a story about simple difference; it is a story about profound educational inequality within and between nations. If we imagine a similar 17x disparity between two American workers, it would be similar to the difference between someone who makes $15,000 working minimum wage in a fast food restaurant and someone who gets a quarter million dollars a year as an executive.

The whole long international history of how these different universities came to be so economically different is something I can’t get into here. And there are, for that matter, some interesting commonalities between the universities that aren’t obvious from the official statistics. For instance, I happen to know that the official count of the staff population is probably too low in both cases, since both universities employ significant groups of outside contractors to do various sorts of campus service work. While Paris-8 has private security guards, UChicago has, for instance, outsourced its janitorial staff; and these people should probably be counted as staff, because they are regular campus workers even if their paychecks are routed through some private entity. The faculty counts are probably unreliable as well, since both campuses hire teachers who are graduate students and, in Chicago’s case, temporary adjunct faculty who probably aren’t being counted in the official size of the faculty population. (This is, of course, just a guess; I don’t know for sure how they compile these figures. But it’s well-known that, in the U.S. case, there are various reasons why administrators don’t like to count grad student teachers in the ranks of their teaching staff.) At any rate, it’s anyone’s guess whether the systematic skewing of these figures would cancel out across these two universities in the context of the comparison here.

In a lot of ways it’s an unsatisfying comparison. Similarly vast wealth disparities could be found by comparing UChicago to an American community college. Still, even leaving aside all the cultural and intellectual and sociological and historical and political differences that separate UChicago and Paris-8, leaving aside everything that you would have to consider to make a comparison satisfying to an anthropologist, even just looking at the most crude and basic figures, it’s worth thinking about the extent to which campus life is bluntly determined by available wealth. Indeed, maybe it’s good to start out by thinking about the gross inequities in material resources across universities. Maybe only once you’ve taken account of that can you really understand how some kinds of academic life depend on large fluxes of cash or, conversely, manage to flourish in spite of them.

Colleges and universities should never underestimate the power of special, transformational, and even sacred spaces on their campuses… Universities are products of history and tradition. Not only are they institutions of scholarly learning, but they also are sites of memory and meaning, with cultural spaces that have played host to decades or even centuries of ritual.

…Such transformational places with unique emotional resonance have an almost sacred nature. The word “religious” comes from the Latin verb religare, meaning to bind or reconnect. Thus, anything that reconnects us is, inherently, a deeply personal or spiritual experience that has great meaning — and the university campus is ripe with opportunities for people to reconnect.

…Elite universities understand the importance of branding in creating long-lasting loyalty among students, and they use very specific and often-repeated images in such efforts… such imagery typically has very little to do with dormitories, classrooms, libraries, or students working late into the night. Most images focus on the campus as a landscape, with views of special buildings, students walking or lounging on an open green, and, of course, football players or bands performing on the stadium’s holy ground.

So the sacred spaces on campus are something to be branded. Something to be created as a spectacular image that will produce “unique emotional resonance,” that will give us a “deeply personal or spiritual experience that has great meaning.” This Orwellian language deserves, I think, to be stood on its head: “unique” here really means “totally generic,” and “deeply personal” amounts to “totally determined by cunning advertisers.” For there is after all nothing personal in a pre-scripted contact with the sacred, except through the medium of delusion.

Sacred space in this discourse basically serves two instrumental ends: to create “great meaning” and to increase the university’s bottom line by stimulating alumni donations. Broussard continues:

Alumni of those institutions and others whose campuses have transformational and sacred spaces return to a wealth of traditions and reconnect with their alma mater, which is integral to giving back to their respective schools. Students who attend commuter institutions are not as likely to form the same kinds of emotional attachments, and as a result such institutions miss out on fund-raising and other opportunities associated with having a robust, dedicated, and committed alumni base.

… Once these places have been identified, it is essential to reinforce their function and develop their storylines. What is the history of the site? What meaning does it have? Tell that story by using signage, seating, plantings, art, and paving — elements that support but do not destroy the place’s uniqueness. This offers a great opportunity for fund-raising programs: Storytelling becomes a cultural-support system and should be treasured and nurtured by all parties.

Here we have the new culturalist advertising: it’s slicked up with a rusty anthropological language of meaning and ritual, as if ’60s Victor Turner-esque anthropology had provided a new marketing jargon for the early 21st century. Broussard is of course the president of a landscape consulting and architecture firm, so the article seems to amount essentially to a piece of free advertising for his service, courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Ed. I hate to talk about the “commodification of higher education,” since the very phrase seems to embody a political bias that precludes rather than enables further analysis, but sometimes there are cases, like these, that seem to fit the category too well to give it up.

My daughter is a senior from a public school with a class size of 589. She has a 4.0 GPA with mostly advanced and AP classes, except required classes. She has an SAT of 2,250, ACT 36. So she is a National Merit finalist, President Scholar candidate, and a winner of MI Southeast Conference All Academy Award (only five students in her school win). She is a cellist in symphony orchestra and a varsity crew member on the rowing team.

Yet she was rejected by four Ivy schools and put on the waiting list for the University of Chicago. What went wrong? Her counselor was stunned by her rejection. What should she do to get off the waiting list?

…
Answer:Your daughter sounds like a terrific scholar, musician, and athlete. The world of selective college admissions is so hyper-competitive that trying to read the tea leaves about why decisions were rendered is almost impossible…

One feels sorry for the daughter, she is such a quantitatively perfect person. Her SAT score is higher than most graduate students’ monthly incomes. She has perfect grades. She has perfect stats. She has more honors and decoratations than a military veteran. She comes from a public school, so she isn’t too marked by obvious badges of class status. She appears, at least to her parent, as a completely flawless unit ready for insertion into what was, evidently, expected to be a flawlessly meritocratic system.

Such was the strength of the expectation, that perfect preparation equals perfect success, that its failure provokes a moment of stunned incomprehension. “What went wrong?” On one level, this question is rhetorical, even performative: the parent already knows what went wrong: their daughter didn’t get in where she was supposed to. The very question what went wrong? presupposes an assumption that the daughter could not possibly have been rejected, projects an image of a world that functions automatically, a giant sorting system in which the best reliably get what they deserve.

The system is fake, to state the obvious. For one thing, because the qualities that make one a perfect student are themselves not evenly distributed from equal starting points; rather they’re a function of family background, class status, home town, gender, race… The response to her letter read in part: “Gender does play a role and it is simply more competitive for young women at most places these days.” I wasn’t aware of that but I guess it’s not surprising, given statistics that more women than men are going to college.

But these kinds of systematic biases are relatively minor flaws in the meritocracy compared to its real problem, which is that sometimes it just doesn’t produce the reliable result one expected, sometimes it doesn’t pick people who seem to be the best, sometimes its results are shocking, random, arbitrary. This arbitrariness is understood by the people making the choices between applicants, I think, but is viscerally felt much more by the system’s rejects.

One feels sorry for the daughter, or at least for her parent, whose fantasies of vicarious success seem to be developed to a high degree. It doesn’t seem to occur to people like these to long for a world where higher education wasn’t organized as a massive meritocracy, where the education was more even in quality across different institutions, where a few overvalued elite institutions (and I should know, having gone to two of them now) get more credit than they deserve. There seems to be no chance of a political analysis of class reproduction occurring in this situation. Ultimately, it’s not just the daughter’s rejection that’s shatteringly arbitrary, it’s the whole system of higher education that comes to appear like a castle in the clouds, a fantasy world of success more longed for than understood.

But just to give some sense of the ludicrous nature of student work at private universities, in a bit of an echo of Bousquet’s argument, I want to share some quick figures that I’ve come up with. In essence, it turns out that if you’re working minimum wage jobs at private universities, you’re arguably still paying the university to be at those jobs.

For instance. When I was in college at Cornell University, the tuition began in 2000 at $24,760 and ended up in 2004 at $28,630 annually, while university-provided room and board ranged from $8706 to $9529. You could live off campus for less than that, of course, but once you accounted for books and transportation I could imagine eight or nine thousand dollars in room, board, etc, being about right. Just taking the cheaper 2001 figures, the estimated cost of attendance would have been at least $33,466.

One big employer, of course, was the library, which paid the state minimum wage, then $5.15/hr. Cornell had two 15-week terms, so you were paying $1115.53 each week thirty weeks a year. Now, there are a hundred sixty eight hours in every week. So every hour you were at Cornell, even the ones when you were sleeping, drunk, daydreaming, etc., cost you ($1115.53/168 equals) $6.64 in tuition and living expenses. And what’s absurd is simply this: if you had that minimum wage job at the library circulation desk, you were in effect paying the university $1.49 an hour just for the privilege of showing up at work. Negative net pay, when you subtracted the hourly cost of living and tuition.

For another point of reference, at the University of Chicago, where I am now, undergrad tuition is currently $12,834 per eleven-week quarter (ten weeks of class plus a week of exams). The total cost of attendance is currently estimated at an astounding $52,450 for a year of on-campus residence. This comes out to $1589.39 per week or $9.46/hour. If you work, for instance, at the door of the campus pub, you get paid $7/hr, for a net loss of $2.46/hr.

Obviously there are all kinds of complaints you could make about this calculation. You could argue that no one is paying “per hour” every hour. (Though colleges do market themselves as purveyors of comprehensive, total, unceasing experiences.) You could argue that students are getting financial aid, and that the pay from their student jobs doesn’t go directly towards tuition, but probably more towards food, drink, small necessities, merriment, and the like. OK, but we’re talking total costs versus total wages here, and we have to realize that the costs of attending these private universities are largely hidden or spread out over time. A lot of the financial aid is in loans, which are just a way of delaying the bad news and moreover appear to increase total costs through interest, and one might argue also that most of the grants come from the federal government, hence from the taxpayers, and that some fraction of the student’s future taxes are just, in a sense, going to pay back this grant.

Ultimately the point is simple. Given the relatively bad pay of entry-level campus jobs, and the extremely high cost of private education, these jobs are in fact a net loss. Think of these jobs as paying to volunteer for the university – except that instead of being in some interesting field of your choice, you’re paying to volunteer for whatever dull task they feel like giving you. And even the more skilled campus jobs – like IT jobs that pay $10 or $12 an hour – are actually much less lucrative than they appear, when you think about how much you’re paying the university every minute that you’re there. Jeff Williams has eloquently argued that modern college education is a form of debt pedagogy. But, as Williams might have stressed more, it’s difficult for college students to comprehend what it means to borrow so much money so young. He comments on the spirit of indenture that’s realized in the shackles of student loans. What about the spirit of indenture realized in jobs that pay less than zero and serve menial campus functions?