Academiology¹: Institutional betrayal
Published on 2024-09-18
My school does this annual survey of the student body to get a pulse for of we feel about the Way Things Are. This year, they had students give a word that best describes how they feel about the school. The word we chose the most wasn't "failure," as I might have expected—I often feel like the school does fall quite short of what I believe it ought to be. This whole academiology thing is indeed me trying to reconcile the fact that the university is—must be—this sacred thing, and yet it demonstrably isn't. So, yes, I think I'd go as far as to say that the university is a failure.
But that wasn't the word most people chose to use. Most people used the word "betrayal." We felt betrayed.
Hearing this was really fascinating, if nothing else than for its specificity. It's easy to feel like the university's failed us, be that for some good reason or just pettiness. To feel betrayed, though, suggests something much more sinister. Something more intentional. And I can't say I believe they're wrong.
This article could have just as easily been called "Academiology¹: Cope". This whole series could have been called "Coping with the fact that school isn't the way I want it to be," because at the end of the day that's all this is. The more Academiology articles I write, the more I have to reckon with the fact that the university as it exists in my mind and the one that exists in reality are two very different things. Before I started trying to be open-minded about it, maybe they were a lot similar, but the harder I try to see the bright side, the more I engage with this place as a sort of fantasy rather than a material thing that has material impacts on people's lives.
This was especially the case in writing this one:
Like, there's not really any bright side to the way my university vacuums up common resources and entraps its students in the outskirts of town. And so, in that article, I resolved to imagine how things could be, rather than what they are, because what else am I going to do? If these articles didn't have happy endings they almost wouldn't make sense as a part of this series.
When I set out to write all of these articles about university, I was trying to come up with a reason not to drop out—something more powerful than "inertia", or "because it's what I'm supposed to do." Today, the reason why I'm still in university is because it gives me access to the people who today are my friends, and it keeps me eligible for Co-op, which might be the one good shot I have at finding stable employment going into a very nebulous future when I don't have all the perks of living next to a tightly integrated campus. There really isn't any magic to it; it's just what needs to be done.
Sometimes, when something bad happens to you, it's easy to get caught up on how things could have been, if only things went a little differently. It's sad. It's hauntological, and at the end of the day, it's completely made up. The only Church of Reason¹ is the one you've constructed in your mind, and that's only as valuable as it is useful to you personally. Reality is often a lot more grim.
Footnotes
¹ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a semi-fictional semi-autobiographical novel about a narrator who talks about the university in a similar way to how I do. I largely got it from this book, in fact. Notably, though, the Church of Reason isn't really a thing that exists even diagetically within the story; it's just the set of all the conceptions the narrator has about the university he works at.
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