I don’t know when the war on university education started in the USA. But I know my mother was an early supporter of the movement in the 1970s.
My mother worked outside the home all her life, just as her mother did, just as her grandmother did, just as her great-grandmother did. In fact, her great-grandmother, an abandoned single mom, moved to Kentucky from Alabama to work in a mill, while another family member that came with her stayed home with her daughter (we’re not sure if that family member was her sister or her mother – that’s a whole ‘nother blog).
My mother was universally respected as a professional. I knew just how important and powerful a secretary was because of her. There are so many men who owe their professional and political reputations to HER management, acumen and instinct. And she acquired most of those skills outside of any formal training. Per a lack of childcare in the evenings and per not believing girl children should be left at home (but my brothers could be, no problem), she took me along to all sorts of professional meetings, and when she was stringing together a couple of part-time jobs, I sat in the floor of an office or our living room, doing bulk mailings with her (training that was essential for my work with nonprofits in the 1980s and 90s).
But my Mom never got a university degree, and mostly saw no reason for most people to get one, includeing me. She worked for many men who had university degrees, and a few women, and she felt too many of them were lacking in basic understanding of good management, as well as common sense. Her derision of people with Master’s Degrees and PhDs was frequently heard in our household – she was always condescending of a higher ed degree, and the higher, the more she condescended.
And yet, tt was my dream to go to a university and get a degree. I can’t remember never wanting that. The idea of sitting in a classroom with other students who, unlike in grade school, WANTED to learn, the idea of having classroom discussions and debates about what we were studying, the idea of CHOOSING what classes I wanted to take, the idea of taking a majority of classes in a subject I cared about, for at least four years – oh, I just couldn’t WAIT! I saw it in movies, I saw it on TV, and I wanted it. Many many years later, watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I so identified with Willow on her first day at college:
It’s just in high school, knowledge was pretty much frowned upon. You really had to *work* to learn anything. But here, the energy, the-the collective intelligence, it’s like this force, t-this penetrating force, an-and I can just feel my mind opening up, you know, an-and letting this place just thrust into and-and spurt knowledge into… That sentence ended up in a different place than it started out in.
It took a lot more than I knew it would to get to go to a university – and not at all the university I had wanted to. I wrote some about that in this blog. But I made it. And the reality is that I would never have done anything that I’ve done professionally, and in many cases, things I’ve done that have been incredibly personally satisfying, without that university experience. Notice I said “university experience”, not just the degree. Because the experience – the sitting in classrooms with other humans and the professor, the discussions, the interactions, the activities outside the classroom – was every bit as important as the degree. Sure, I had fun, I imbibed, I reveled, I misbehaved – but overall, my life then really did revolve around intellectual pursuits, and I loved it. I loved that I would end up at midnight on a second glass of bad wine or passing a joint and discussing what we learned in our medieval and renaissance semester, or the casting choices being made by the director of the Spring musical. One of my fondest memories is packing a room in an apartment with fellow students because many of us didn’t have a TV, and we watched to watch Dustin Hoffman in Death of a Salesman – and we watched it with reverence. Getting so intense and in-depth in studying various subjects – it trained my mind for so much of the work I do now, as well as being incredibly stimulating and, well, FUN.
You do NOT get this experience outside of university. And this experience is so incredibly beneficial for preparing you for your careers (and, yes, you will probably have more than one) and LIFE. It teaches you to read with purpose and to be singularly focused, rather than trying to multitask (which is impossible). It teaches you not to accept things because someone is saying it louder than anything else. It teaches you that there’s little if anything in life that’s black and white. It teaches you to be willing to change your mind in the face of facts. It teaches you to remain curious. It teaches you to respect experts and how to recognize real ones. It teaches you how to evaluate sources. It teaches you the joy of intellectual discussion. And it teaches to listen – to really listen.
All this washes over me whenever I walk on a university campus. It always feel like I’ve come home. It’s why I tried so hard, my first decade back in the USA, to get a university job, and relished the four little teaching gigs I did have. It’s why I was so thrilled to buy a house just three blocks from a university (though that hasn’t manifested into the monthly lectures and evening events I was hoping it would).
I’m not deriding online education. My Master’s degree is via an online education. But the focus was the subject of my career, and I was able to apply what I learned at work almost immediately – sometimes the very next day after learning it (not kidding). I had co-workers to discuss what I was learning – like a classroom. I also leveraged the online community of fellow students provided by the university, to the point that one of the degree organizers said I was the model for other programs. And when there was an opportunity to spend an entire weekend onsite, together, in-person, for course credit, with many of my fellow students from across Europe, I jumped at the chance.
I’m not at all deriding people who don’t pursue university degrees. My husband didn’t pursue a university degree. But he never stopped learning, and did take post grade-school classes. And he’s SUCH an exception: he loves to read books about history and watch PBS shows about history and science. He can get lost in studying Egyptian architecture. He’s German and his favorite president is Teddy Roosevelt, because of how much he’s learned about him. Visit a historic site here in the USA? He’ll walk away knowing more than me. His command of English, which came from both an excellent base of study in the German public school system and his reading of English books ever since, rivals a lot of native speakers here in the USA. He absolutely will change his mind in the face of facts. He’s an innately curious person who I’m convinced can teach himself anything. He can hold his own in any intellectual conversation with university grads. And he loathes right wing podcasters and the “do your own research!” right wing evangelists (because he knows what they really mean). But, again, he is exceptional. And, no, we don’t agree on everything – and our debates involve looking up credible citations for whatever we’re trying to convince the other of.
But the reality is that Republicans don’t want people like my husband. Or me. And universities, for the most part, produce people like me: thoughtful, skeptical, science-based, askers-of-questions, and not easily led by the person shouting the loudest. It’s why every right wing regime, including the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, targeted universities and their students and teachers. It’s why Republicans now are using that playbook.
It’s horrifying to hear some of the negative, derisive things my Mom would say about universities and faculty now a part of the official Republican agenda. I always thought her opinions on this were “out there,” – even my far more conservative father didn’t agree, and was quite supportive of his daughters getting university degrees – he had wanted one himself once upon a time, and regretted that it didn’t work out.
The world needs universities. Humans need universities. And we are losing them at an alarming rate, because of a movement started decades ago.
On a hopeful note, my niece has decided to go to a university, and she’s going to pursue a career in agribusiness. Her farming great-great grandfather on my father’s mother’s side, who never got a university degree but wanted at least one of his kids to have one (and who had to pull the one pursuing such out of school when the Great Depression hit), would be SO PROUD. He wouldn’t dismiss it as unnecessary. That good ole’ Kentucky boy knew the tremendous advantage a university degree gives anyone associated with the business of farming even 100 years ago.
Leave a Reply