Business As Usual

“I was tired of greed in particular and the ostentatious display of wealth that characterizes our times, and the justifications for despoiling the earth and injuring our fellow man.” James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

I have struggled of late to write anything. It’s not due to a lack of interesting topics or a lessening of outrage at the steady decline of the United States driven by the stupidity, incompetence and venality of the Trump Junta and the GOP. That’s a constant for any reasonably conscious citizen today. Day after day Trump defiles the White House and embarasses our country and pulls us deeper into the morass. But how many times can I say that Trump is only a symptom, not the cause, of a much more pernicious disease? The incessant appetite of so-called free market capitalism for more, for bigger, for gaudier, is the disease.

The recent revelations of a sophisticated college admissions scandal angered, but didn’t surprise me. Of course well-heeled people cheat, lie, buy off pliable officials -- that’s the very essence of our hyper-competitive, dog-eat-dog, cat-eat-mouse system, it happens every day in all manner of circumstances. For many years in America, college was reserved for wealthy elites, liberal and conservative, blue-bloods, professionals, WASPs, for the most part. Harvard and Yale and Princeton became elite because they devised admission standards to keep the unwashed masses, predominantly Jews and Catholics, from queuing at their ivy-covered gates. Other schools followed suit. The Civil Rights movement, Affirmative Action, and feminism knocked down many of the admission barriers, but then, once the Market assumed the mantle of God in America -- and higher education became just another commodity, like deodorant or soap or suppositories, albeit a commodity with major economic implications for a person’s life -- and the cost of higher education rocketed into the stratosphere, money emerged as a significant barrier to a college education. Competition for entry got tougher, the stakes became higher and more unforgiving, the enormous student loan debts enervating.  

The best book I’ve read about the dismal state of American higher education is Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz. He covers it all: students turned into consumers, colleges and universities catering to “customers” rather than students, the emphasis on courses and degrees that lead to profitable careers rather than self-exploration, critical thinking, and engaged citizenship, the neutering of the humanities, the explosive growth in administrative positions, the use of low-paid adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, massive classes. And what happens before college with the test prep industry, admission “counselors”, enrichment programs. It’s a bullshit system that does terrible things to kids and makes parents go crazy with fear and worry. I remember attending “college night” at my daughter’s high school when she was a freshman or sophomore. There were probably 150 parents and guardians in the cafeteria, counselors from the school, representatives from local colleges, UCSB, City College, etc. The fear in the place was suffocating, the absolute neurosis on the part of parents who were deathly afraid, or so it felt to me, that their offspring might fail the great university admissions test and be forever left behind, consigned to the register at Taco Bell or taking inventory at Bed, Bath & Beyond just poisoned the atmosphere. I never attended another college night after that.

The wealthy buy their way out of difficulty and I suppose this isn’t new. In a jam with the law, write a check to the attorney and the charge is lessened or dismissed; your kid can’t handle the SAT or ACT, no problem, you can pay a ringer to take the test, and buy off an admissions official with another check. In Excellent Sheep Deresiewicz writes, “For the elite, there is always another extension: a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab. The fat salaries awarded to underperforming CEO’s are an adult version of the A-minus.”

That’s life in America.