For Bertell Ollman, as for the leaders of the student protests in the mid 1960’s, one’s university education cannot be separated from political concerns. What do they mean by this? Arguably, they are claiming two essential things. First, they want to banish the idea that university as we find it today and in the 1960’s is removed from the everyday lives of people; it is not an “ivory tower,” as some believe it to be. Instead, it is linked to the outside world, a world which for Ollman and the students in the 1960’s, is divided between rulers and the ruled. As such, and this is their second claim, one’s university education is necessarily either pointed against the existing society, i.e. critical of it, or else it affirms this society. In other words, a student or professor is either part of the solution or part of the problem. I will argue that while Ollman and the students of the sixties, particularly those at Berkeley, are correct to identify today’s university as an institution which, for the most part, trains “pliant subjects” for future positions in capitalist society, the idea that university education is and should be political is problematic. After outlining precisely how today’s university trains students for future jobs in capitalist society, I will argue that the university does not and cannot solely aim to criticize capitalist society. This would be to dismiss important disciplines such as philosophy and literature, which are apolitical in themselves, and can work to complement Marxist criticism of the existing power structure.
Before discussing the problems associated with politicizing university education, we need to explore Ollman’s description of today’s university, which is for the most part accurate. His account echoes the words of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid 1960’s, who state that “the university has become grotesquely distorted into a “multiversity”; a public utility serving the purely technical needs of a society” (We Want A University, 44). Ollman holds that this characterization of the university, as a training ground where students acquire skills necessary for success in the “outside world,” not only aptly describes North American universities today, but also higher educational institutions throughout history. He states that
what's called "education" has taken many different forms over the centuries, just as its content has varied from A to Z, depending not only on what was known at the time but on the skills and personal qualities the rulers of each society wished to inculcate into their subjects” (Ollman, 6).
Thus in ancient Athens students learned rhetoric, ancient Spartan students learned swordsmanship and military valour, and students in medieval Europe primarily learned theology (6). In each of these periods, the curriculum reflects the interests of those who ruled their societies, not their own interests in course material.
The case is no different for the majority of today’s university students, who, according to Ollman, attend school because they want to acquire skills which will be beneficial when they graduate and enter the outside world, which is a capitalist world. As he says, “after struggling and sacrificing through four or more years of university, you are ready to start a "career" (4). Based on personal experience, I agree with Ollman here. In classroom discussions and casual conversation, it is common today to hear students, especially arts students (the type of student I associate with most), justify what they learn in university by listing various skills which they will inevitably acquire through such an education, and which will be useful for future careers. What exactly are these skills? Perhaps the one which these students most frequently cite, and the one which they believe sets them apart from students of other faculties, is the capacity for “critical thinking.” What is critical thinking? Many cannot provide much of an account, but they do know that certain banks and advertising agencies value it greatly. They also know that an arts education is generally regarded to help students hone their ability to think critically, in contrast to a business or engineering education which, they say, merely teaches students to plug numbers into formulas.
Another skill many students believe they will acquire by completing an arts degree is communication. And how could we not? With the amount of papers we write every semester, we are bound to get better at expressing ourselves. Reading and speaking are also essential communication skills which an arts education endows students with. If we do just the right number of presentations, and just the right number of readings, we will have acquired the ability to communicate clearly and thus effectively, skills which are endlessly transferable. What else do today’s students hope to acquire from their education? What else do they find useful? Their list of skills is long indeed. Time management will come in handy when we have employers to appease; thus our assignments and our professors, those to whom we hand assignments in, act as the products of our work and our bosses respectively. Interpersonal skills, i.e. the ability to interact with other people and be attentive to their needs, will be useful in the business meetings which we will inevitably attend. This is certainly the popular attitude on campuses today, namely that the reason we take arts courses, the reason we pursue a Bachelor of Arts degree, is to develop skills which will be useful in the capitalist society where we will find our place.
It is this instrumental mentality that the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement identified to be the defining characteristic of their own university experience. The strict requirements that a student had to fulfill in order to graduate, which are nearly identical to the requirements of a bachelor’s degree today, make one’s educational experience sound more like work in a factory. They describe their educational careers in the following (depressing) terms:
we get a four-year-long series of sharp staccatos: eight semesters, forty courses, one hundred twenty or more “units,” ten to fifteen impersonal lectures per week, one to three oversized discussion meetings per week led by poorly paid graduate student “teachers” (43).
This regimented experience prompted them to nickname the university “the knowledge factory” and refer to themselves as “student cogs.”
To borrow Marxist terminology, this experience of being a “student-cog” in the “knowledge factory” leads to the alienation of academic labour. This is to say that since many students today treat course material, i.e readings, as ‘stuff’ which needs to be converted into product (much in the same way that raw materials in a factory need to be transformed into products), the intrinsic value of the ‘stuff’ disappears; its only value lies in its ability to produce in us the required skill or the grade we receive. Since subject matter no longer needs to be grappled with for its own sake, students become bored and angry that they have to learn it. While this hostile relationship to one’s studies will perhaps always exist (people have their preferences), it is seen increasingly on campuses today. Scribbled on a desk at the library, for instance, are the words “school sucks” (which is of course followed by the question, “then why are you here?”, which is followed by “nerd”, and so on).
Dennis Lee, a graduate student at the University of Toronto in the 1960’s, gives an insightful account of being alienated from his studies. Lee recalls sitting in a graduate seminar in 1965 and feeling no real connection to the subject matter which was being discussed. He writes,
I can recall my sense of utter estrangement as I wound my way through the realization that what they were saying had no purchase on me, that the experience of being in that seminar was without meaning for me, that doing graduate work had not become real, and that my entire undergraduate and high school education had been mainly a sham” (Getting to Rochdale, 46).
At the root of Lee’s estrangement was his realization that the university was not what it purported to be; it was not an ivory tower dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. It had “fallen away from its own ideal of a liberal education” and become, as the students at Berkeley labeled it, a training ground for the technical society beyond its grounds (48). In other words, Lee had realized the stark reality of the contemporary university. He had previously overlooked this reality because he was interested in the material. In the seminar, however, the dim state of affairs hit him in an almost inexpressible way. As for today’s students, your connection to course material had no value other than what grades were possible because of such a connection. University had revealed itself to be “a fraud” (48).
Ollman makes a similar observation about the alienation which today’s students experience from their course work. Perhaps the main reason for such alienation is the examination, the popular method of evaluation in most university faculties today. He asks, “why exams, and why so many?” (171). For Ollman, exams are the strongest evidence that what we learn is only valuable for what it gives us in the future. He provides a list of reasons as to why exams in particular are intended to prepare us for capitalist society. This list includes the preparation for a rigorous work situation, mental, emotional, and moral preparation for fast paced work, as well as responding to strict orders such as “discuss this” or “outline that” (149). Ollman notices that these methods of evaluation lead to a similar level of alienation experienced in the daily capitalist world. He writes that
students know, for example, that exams don't only involve reading questions and writing answers. They also involve forced isolation from other students, prohibition on talking and walking around and going to the bathroom, writing a lot faster than usual, physical discomfort, worry, fear, anxiety (lots of that) and often guilt (35).
Thus in the same way working people experience stress and physical pain as a result of forcing themselves to constantly produce for their employers so they can afford to live, students suffer mentally and physically to prepare for exams. As the leaders of the Free Speech Movement say, even “human nerves and flesh are transmuted under
the pressure and stress of the university routine. It is as though we have become raw material in the strictly organic sense” (43). Stress levels have reached new highs lately in North American schools, even resulting in suicides. In these troubling statistics we can surely detect radical alienation from one’s academic labour.
Thus Ollman’s assessment of today’s university experience is mostly accurate. For the most part, it can be said that students today flock to university in order to acquire essential skills for careers in the outside capitalist world. This is evident in conversations, both inside and outside the classroom. Whether they desire these positions (and the lives they entail) themselves or the system conditions students to desire them, they regard university as essential for carrying on with their lives, and parents undoubtedly influence this view. We go to university to avoid becoming garbage men! Further, Ollman’s account mirrors those students of the 1960’s who viewed their educational experience as increasingly resembling the capitalist society outside of it. For Ollman, however, universities have always responded to the needs of the surrounding society.
But as suggested above, Ollman’s account of university today, which accords with that of the student movement in the 1960’s, is correct for the most part. It is empirically true that students across North America are increasingly entering university in order to acquire skills which will be useful for future careers in capitalist society. Rather than being, in the words of the Berkeley protesters, “turned on by a great idea, a great man, or a great book,” many students who pursue degrees in the Arts view course material as raw material waiting to be converted into products, whether these products
be essays, assignments, or exams. This results in painful boredom and restlessness, a feeling which was exemplified by Dennis Lee, a formerly engaged student who realized the falseness of his education and the university institution. These moods are also acutely visible around university campuses during exams.
Since this is generally true, Ollman might not have felt the need to discuss the survival of the liberal education in a few schools across the continent. Through its exploration of primary texts of the western canon, the University of King’s College in Halifax is one of these schools. There, professors and students share a love for grappling with these great texts, and do not seek to gain skills or grades which will help them achieve a position within capitalist society. Granted, there are students there who do not have this vigorous enthusiasm for the texts and human inquiry; but there will always be rats, as Marx knew. The point is that at King’s, (and in other pockets within large research institutions) texts are treated for their ability to say something about the human condition, to open up avenues of discussion about the mysteries of existence. To read Plato and only think about what skills one will develop, such as the ability to articulate oneself, would be to miss the force of his points. So while students at King’s, and other keen students across North American universities today (they are out there) do not go to school without regard for the occupations they may hold in the future, these occupations are not their first priority. Instead, they aim at nothing less than opening their world and acquiring a deeper understanding of where they came from.
This brings us to Ollman’s larger claim, namely that professors and students who are not explicitly critical of the established order, which is a capitalist order, must be in
favour of this state. Is this the case? Is the only true or worthwhile criticism economic criticism, pointed at exposing the material conditions behind history, i.e. social and political phenomena? There is definitely a lot packed into this type of criticism. Marxists are not only interested in exposing how we are determined economically--how our lives have and will be dictated by the economic status of our parents and grandparents--but also how we are determined by other social structures, or how the ruling class attempts to control the populace through other channels. Ollman mentions how the advertising industry influences our choices, and includes on his “list of the advantages of socialism” that it is “concerned with truth...it would make the false advertising, hope, and outright lies that defiles so much of our public life unnecessary...” (170).
There are many other institutions which exert some degree of power over us. Elementary school itself, with its incessant disciplining, and other institutions such as the police, the army, and even the family work to make us compliant in the system. It is these apparently neutral institutions which Ollman and other Marxists attempt to expose as tools or expressions of the ruling class. These criticisms are indeed well founded and important. Yet can we say that all education should be aimed at exposing them, and that any style of criticism which does not attempt to reveal the “big lie” of capitalism is not proper critique? Further, can we say that those who do not criticize capitalism openly, and attempt to discover its covert influence on our daily lives, are therefore in support of the existing state of affairs? Ollman seems to think so. If one is not critical of the capitalist system, he is being disingenuous toward humanity, and is blinded to the real, worthwhile problems facing people today.
But what about other kinds of critique? There are two disciplines which cannot, I think, be constantly subjected to Marxist critique, and can actually be used to the Marxist’s advantage if he treats them on their own terms. These disciplines are literature and philosophy, two expressions of culture which Marx famously said to be symptoms of prior economic conditions and therefore less important than criticizing the power of the ruling class and trying to eventually overthrow its power. From these two disciplines, which aim to discover and enhance our understanding of human existence, the Marxist can gain additional perspectives on his own practice. As the Dalai Lama suggests, “Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned with only gain and profitability” (29). One cannot simply assume that the ethical posture will take care of itself. Therefore the Marxist needs to welcome the perspectives of other disciplines, philosophy and literature in particular.
Ollman is generally correct about the state of university education today. Like other higher learning institutions in humanity’s distant past, the curriculum, i.e. what we learn, is only valuable for the positions we will acquire later in life, in capitalist society. This is empirically true; one need only listen to conversations between arts majors to detect the influence of capitalism, and thus the pure instrumentality of one’s education. One student in a history tutorial last year said it best: “all that matters is that I get a job.” But we would be remiss to overlook the survival of liberal education in North America, asurvival which requires keen students, faculty, and a supportive institution which respect ideas for their intrinsic worth and not what one gains through studying them. I was fortunate to attend, and still attend, such an institution. This is also not to say that there are not students and teachers in larger institutions, such as Dalhousie, who respect education for its own sake. I have come across several thrilling academic personalities in these places, which are, as Ollman suggests, for the most part dominated by the “means-ends” mentality.
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