I started graduate school last week. There, I said it. I had originally signed up for a course called Ethnic Literature and The Other, assuming it would be all Gabrielle Garcia Marquez-ish, only to find out on the first day it was a course on Detective Literature. !!!! WTF? BOR-ing. Like I want 16 weeks of uber-jocularity after what I went through with elections last year. No thanks. So I switched to a course on Politics and Poetry, which will no doubt be another jaunt into jocularity, but at least I like poetry. I’m looking forward to this one, anyway.
Being on campus reminded me that I fucking hate university campuses. Someone really ought to re-write Eliot’s The Wasteland for application to university campuses, because as far as I can tell after spending more than a decade of my life on them, they are an intellectual wasteland. It’s like Montessori for grown-ups. The instructors don’t actually teach, they just shepherd students into kindergarten circles and watch as the students stare each other down. The fear cloaked in apathy is thick.
I like the campus where I work. I work at a junior college that services students who were not shepherded through “college tracks” and who no one ever thought would be college material. There is little apathy in my classroom, because the students in my classes can’t believe they are there. They know they aren’t supposed to be, so they are going to take every advantage, and they are very engaged. Not so at the university. Something has been going wrong there for a long, long time, and it’s difficult to fix because the system–a good one–is being attacked by conservatives, making college professors highly defensive.
