THE EMPEROR'S NEW UNIVERSITY

When I was an undergrad at Northwestern (1957-1961) pretending to be a harmless speech ed major when I was actually cramming in courses in theatre, Angna Enters (1897 - 1989) came to campus. She was performing as a mime, though she was a pan-artist, half Isadora Duncan and half Yoko Ono. This was not Marcel Marceau pretending to be in a box or pestered by a fly. This was the transformation of ordinary movement into gestural dance.

One of her bravura pieces was the enrobing of a pope -- or was it a dauphin? At any rate, it was a pantomime of putting on layers and layers of medieval clothing, each more elaborate, voluminous and magnificent than the last until it was topped with a mitre or crown. Rather like the enrobing of Elizabeth II for her coronation, which made her advisors worry that the weight of the vestments (the crown weighed something like thirty pounds) might press the eighteen-year-old down to the ground. The Japanese have a tradition of brides assuming layers and layers of kimonos, but they are silk and relatively light.

Angna Enters was capable of a sort of mass hypnotism so that when she finally stood wearing no more than she had begun with, we could “see” her emperor-worthy clothes, just as in the myth. I am not going to hold up this metaphor (you know it too well) but the reverse: a situation in which all the robes and trappings and prestige are actually present, but the clever emperor, in naked authenticity, has dodged out the bottom and escaped. This is a riff about our institutions: church, university, court, hospital -- all those situations where the priest, professor, judge, and doctor -- who once wore simple black or white gowns to show their prestige and role -- have been so over-layered with additional garments that they have been paralyzed. Pressed into services of all kinds, buildings of pretentious significance, regulations of labyrinthine intricacy, and endless insurance oversight, these institutions now require mammoth endowments and barely have the energy to inspire, teach, judge, or heal.

This is a long blog but a short essay, so I’ll single out universities. One can take such little tales too far into metaphor, but perhaps now that the universities are getting ready for their coliseum seasons of homecoming gathered around the stadium where cheering former students watch ghetto recruits give each other head injuries so they can afford their drug bills, children can point . . . but that’s sensationalism. Surely classes meet and research proceeds, even if international industrial corporations control the curriculum and the teacher is a graduate assistant instead of a tenured professor. No doubt replacing the dusty books in the library with shiny new computers is more than justified. Foreign students who write and speak better English than those from our own country are simply more selected (and more able to pay the tuition). Still, at some point, one has to ask whether universities still educate in the classic way of guiding hard thought to sound conclusions.

People keep fussing about the radical (root) changes in human knowledge brought about by research on DNA, fMRI, particle physics, nano-technology, extra-terrestrial geology, and particularly the internet. U of Chicago's Randel, quoting Readings’s history of the modern university says:

"In general the modern University has had three ideas. The story begins . . . with Kant, who envisioned the University as guided by the concept of reason. Kant’s vision is followed by Humboldt’s idea of culture, and more recently the emphasis has been on the techno-bureaucratic notion of excellence. The distinguishing feature of the last on this list is that it actually lacks a referent. (p. 54)

". . . With the decline of the nation-state and its replacement by a transnational economy in which capital pursues profits across all boundaries . . . The economic counterpart of the hollowing out of political subjectivity that accompanies the decline of the nation-state" is 'consumerism–which is correctly perceived as the most pressing threat to the traditional subject of university education in North America’ (p. 48).”

http://iotu.uchicago.edu/randel.html

I’m a terrible snob when it comes to universities. In my NU undergrad years, I was very elitist about the arts, defining their initiated adepts as more gifted, more “real,” and more penetrating (go ahead, make a pun out of it) than others. But I wasn’t good enough for Broadway (the only possible destination was Manhattan) so I did a reverse (it was the days of Peace Corps) by going to the Montana reservations. After twenty years there and also back in Portland (long story), I had a chance to attend the U of Chicago through the back door by enrolling at one of the small seminaries in the “Cluster” around their eminence. I earned a master’s in the U of C Div School and have gloated over it ever since. In fact, armed with new confidence (possibly unjustified), I’ve returned to my beloved Montana reservation.

It works, you see. Because it’s not about content, it’s about process, it’s about learning how to learn no matter where you are or what the circumstances. Forget prosperity, forget recognition. Forget even the great networking and name-dropping potential. Books -- well, everything becomes a book. Most brilliantly of all, it’s no longer necessary to be on a campus because the Internet has replaced the need for adjacency, as my little cluster seminary now recognizes in its plan to sell the building and leave Chicago.

The problem, for both the university and myself, is monetization. My degree is useless here. I send no big checks back to either alma mater. I do work for which there is no certification, just satisfaction. My scholarship is social security. I’m not the only one. The aging former student body has become a planetary diasphora.

Is that good or bad? Dunno. Mostly just unrecognizable. What will it do to the traditional vested (invested) investment-wearing university? Dunno. Somehow it was the university education that returned me to the naked world of aging hunter-gatherer, gleefully capering over the horizon with a laptop under my arm, proud of myself as any bare-assed three-year-old. Think of it as a pantomime. I hope it would make Elizabeth II smile.