By Sheldon

A cluster of articles on higher education has prompted some reflections on higher ed in America, where it’s going, where it’s been, and what may become of it. The first is from May of last year, a piece by Mike Konczal, “What’s Left After Higher Education is Dismantled?” In it he describes the growth of the for-profit college at the expense of the public university, with the collapse last year of Corinthian Colleges as a demonstration of what we can normally expect from the for-profit schools. I do take exception, somewhat, to this characterization having co-founded and led a for-profit university that was, and remains one of the best in its field. But Konczal does have a point. His other point is that these new universities are more about making money than actually educating students, which means that now, “sub-prime” refers to the education rather than the predatory loans used to fund them.

The question posed in the title is a good one; as for-profit colleges simultaneously proliferate and fail to educate, public universities lose more and more funding thanks to backward state legislatures. How will the ordinary people manage to get a college education?

Next in our lineup was a wonderful piece by Matt Taibbi, “College Kids Aren’t the Only Ones Demanding ‘Safe Spaces.’” that starts out describing the kind of antics that give college students a reputation as “delicate snowflakes,” in which students at the University of Kansas went ballistic over some pro-Donald Trump chalk graffiti. It was an over-reaction that drew the scorn of both ends of the political spectrum, with lots of jokes about the horrors of having someone disagree with you and the desire many feel for a “safe space.” But Taibbi’s analysis makes clear that both sides were missing the point. In short, he points out that these college campus freak-outs are hardly restricted to campus life. They are a reflection of an environment shaped by consumerist media strategies. The “safe space” movement, he writes:

…has virtually nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with money.
The political punditry business is all about riling up an ad-consuming, subscription-buying demographic. We’re paid by the eyeball, and you don’t attract eyes by sticking fingers in them. So opinion-makers on both sides quickly learn to stay in their lanes.

To put what he says another way, the consumerist media embraces a business model that depends on its customers feeling as unsafe as possible, so that they crave constant reassurance, regardless of whether that reassurance corresponds with reality at any point.

Now, to get some perspective on this, let’s go back to higher education in ancient Greece, which was (and to a large extent, remains) the model for education in the West. Higher education was the province of the moneyed class—our word “school” comes from the Greek word for “leisure.” If there was one word that describes these people, it would be, “safe.” They were rich. They didn’t have to work. In fact, they wouldn’t be caught dead working with their hands (one reason why experimental science never caught on in Greece until the Hellenistic period). They could do whatever they damn well pleased. It is this kind of existence that university life has tried to replicate; students have the leisure to study, or not. They can go get drunk, which is also a fine old educational tradition: the word “symposium” comes from a Greek word meaning “drinking together.”

This sense of safety that grew out of their status and privilege meant that words and ideas were far more abstract and far less dangerous. Consider, for instance, Donald Trump. He doesn’t have to fear for his job or much else because, by the sweaty sandals of Pheidippides, he’s rich. He need not fear ideas or their effects.
Now, consider the rest of us.

College students face the prospect of deep debt once they leave school. There is a growing awareness that their education won’t be adequate even for the field they’re studying if all the jobs suddenly get outsourced. Once-lucrative jobs in law and medicine are evaporating. A few educators and students are even wondering whether their college education ought to help students find themselves intellectually or fashion their sense of adult values. In the larger society, we incarcerate more people than anyone else. The middle class is hollowed out. There are still serious problems with access to health care. People who years ago would never have feared the government now fear the government. Economic catastrophes are common. We shoot each other in large numbers so often it barely registers and, if you happen to be the wrong color, just breathing can be a capital offense.

Is it any wonder that (a) we all act as if we are afraid of our own shadows and don’t have the option to crawl back into our burrows for another six weeks or (b) that as a population we are easy targets for what I submit is now our number one domestic manufacturing product: fear.

Years ago Sam Keen wrote a remarkable book called Faces of the Enemy: Reflections on the Hostile Imagination, and coined the phrase “surplus evil.” The original point of the book was to examine surplus evil manufactured for prosecuting warfare, but someone discovered that there is money to be made in that business right here at home. We are saturated in fear, media consumers marinate in it. It has become part of us and Taibbi suggests, probably correctly, that we are addicted to it.

This is the essence of “political correctness” as the term has been hijacked, mainly by the political right, as a means to shut down arguments that they could not win. But now it is the face of the enemy, of ideological censorship, and a hint that it is just the advance force that will subject us all to horrible abuses and loss of status, by the privileged class in particular.

We react disproportionately because we are afraid. Education is supposed to happen in an environment that is safe, not from conflicting ideas, but from fear of entertaining them. As Frank Herbert wrote years ago, “Fear is the mind killer…”