I accorded a certain respect to Chris Hedges when I was a teenager. I regarded him as a model journalist. I believe I wrote about how his book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning on many of my college applications.
Some of the admissions officers must have been impressed, because I was approved for better schools than I had any right to join based on my patchy transcript.
Last night, it was a bit of a blast from the past for me to come across an article of his on Truthdig about the manifest failure of American higher education. Hedges diagnoses the problems clearly, but makes some laughably elemental errors about why the academy is a wasteful relic that destroys minds and wastes lives.
In full disclosure, I’ve dropped out of two excellent American universities. My transcript is a mix of As, Fs and no-credits. I owe outstanding debts to two of the finest schools in New York. I went to a private school in the city considered to be a laughing stock among other such institutions, but they still do manage to send their student body – largely made up of upper class twits – to respectable schools.
Onward to the article itself.
The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service—economic, political and social—come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and of course the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions. Those who defy the system—people like Ralph Nader—are branded as irrational and irrelevant. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement and information systems are the only things that matter.
Hedges writes this, mind you, while lecturing at Princeton. The blindness he demonstrates towards himself no longer shocks me. He takes paychecks without complaint from an institution that he regards as reprehensible. He insults the intelligence of his own students without regard to his own self-condemnation in doing so.
This is what you would expect from the son of a minister who has gone on to praise the mad contradictions of religion.
“There’s a certain kind of student at these schools who falls in love with the mystique and prestige of his own education,” said Elyse Graham, whom I taught at Princeton and who is now doing graduate work at Yale. “This is the guy who treats his time at Princeton as a scavenger hunt for Princetoniana and Princeton nostalgia: How many famous professors can I collect? And so on. And he comes away not only with all these props for his sense of being elect, but also with the smoothness that seems to indicate wide learning; college socializes you, so you learn to present even trite ideas well.”
But why is it this way, Mr. Hedges? Do you think it might have something to do with the government – the institution that pumps billions into these institutions annually? Who benefits from this state of affairs? It’s certainly not Wall Street – their businesses and reputations have been destroyed by the events of recent years.
Violent men decide how to accredit universities. They determine the permitted structure. So long as the schools make their legal requirements and please the parents who pay for most of the rest of the education, the institutions continue to thrive.
We get to the heart of the matter later on in the article:
The people I loved most, my working-class family in Maine, did not go to college. They were plumbers, post office clerks and mill workers. Most of the men were military veterans. They lived frugal and hard lives. They were indulgent of my incessant book reading and incompetence with tools, even my distaste for deer hunting, and they were a steady reminder that just because I had been blessed with an opportunity that was denied to them, I was not better or more intelligent. If you are poor you have to work after high school or, in the case of my grandfather, before you are able to finish high school. College is not an option. No one takes care of you. You have to do that for yourself. This is the most important difference between them and the elites.
It’s tragicomic. Hedges has spent most of his life cataloguing the abuses of military men at great personal cost. In his books, he’s described how his career hollowed out his soul and destroyed his relationships. Yet he continues to praise the violence, ignorance and bigotry of his own petty, ignorant and boorish family.
Most of these students are afraid to take risks. They cower before authority. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what their professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead. Challenging authority is not a career advancer. Freshmen arrive on elite campuses and begin to network their way into the elite eating clubs, test into the elite academic programs and lobby for elite summer internships. By the time they graduate they are superbly conditioned to work 10 or 12 hours a day electronically moving large sums of money around.
“The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name,” Deresiewicz wrote. “It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.”
Hedges writes about himself and his milieu, of course.
Some of us are not stupid. Some of us do not cower before authority. Some of us do not lick the boots of the powerful for a few dirty pennies. Some of us don’t need a university to educate ourselves.
If Hedges truly challenged authority – spoke the truth against the moral myths that he was raised with – then he would not work at Princeton. His family would not contact him any longer. He would probably lose his publishing deals. If he would call soldiers what they are – hired killers – then his life would start to change quickly.
It’s easy to complain. It’s risky to live your own values. Here’s a man who has no problem hanging out in war zones for decades dodging shrapnel, but refuses to look past his own nose.
What’s one – and only – principle underpinning investigative journalism?
Follow the fucking money.
It’s not that hard.
Follow the money until you get to the answers.
By all means, blame the students. Ignore the gun in the room – but don’t pretend that you’re speaking about the truth. The same people that blow up children overseas are the guys funneling money into the universities. If you’re concerned about the state of education, start asking questions as to why genocidal maniacs are allowed to run the institutions that teach children and young adults.
Would you expect anything else from killers, thieves and terrorists? Would you not expect them to corrupt everything that they touch? These are not great mysteries. These are not byzantine conspiracies. It’s all right in daylight.
