Scarcities at My Former Research 1 University

by Lucy S.

This is copied from some paper and pen writing I did yesterday.

It is almost 4 pm and I am on the part of the campus where I spent most of my time during the six semesters working on my BA here. I rarely come here anymore, but a friend invited me to her thesis defense. It was as funny, fragmented yet holistic, unpredictable, and poignant as she is. I am glad I came.

I am also glad I came because being here makes me confront the scarcities in this place that became so familiar, but could not become home. Scarcities of fair material compensation; scarcities of secure jobs for so many. Scarcities of teachers. Scarcities of active concern for students; only so much of that to go around. Alienation and bewilderment for others. Scarcities of time. Scarcities of warmth, friendship, and deep, true education.

And those scarcities are for the people granted temporary admittance as students; non-tenured PhD professors paid one third or less what the tenured are paid for doing the same work; or longer term residency as wage-slaves – adults systemically herded and economically blackmailed into serving others. There is nothing mutual about it. The latter adults - the served - position themselves as indispensable to institutions where people come together to learn; after all, how could anyone there function without the two hundred-plus upper level administrators all making over $200,000 per year?  But I feel so tired of talking about that fact. They do it because they can; it’s that simple. This will continue and get much worse as long as most people let it.

For most people in the communities around our "public" university, the scarcities manifest as constructed barriers to entry. Structural rationing. The institution does not exist to serve the people of this state; it exists to serve itself. But who or what is ‘itself’? By what logic is it operating?

It is a beautiful mid-May day, sunny, not too humid, temperature in the low 80s. The breezes are not scarce; they at least are not organized and doled out by this institution. On this campus, with so many breezy, shady spots, there is almost nowhere to just sit down in the shade. There are four metal tables which each seat four people, chained to the ground near the library, and they are taken. They’ve always been popular sitting spots. Up a few steps from the broad space between the two lines of buildings facing each other, so many metal tables and chairs sit chained to the concrete in the sun with no trees around. When it is cold during our frigid upper Midwest winters that can go on so long, it is even colder there with the wind blowing beyond the shelter of the rows of buildings. When it is hot, it is scorching there with the concrete reflecting the heat back up and the sun beating unrelievedly down. Reading or writing is difficult in the glare and wind. Even on relatively mild days like this, it is hot there. There is no scarcity of tables. But there is a scarcity of thought and of care that materializes in these placements. Few people sit at these tables, now or ever.

I keep walking, cross a small street, and find a smaller group of tables, also in the sun. Finally, I decide to sit on this bench height concrete ledge. It sits in the mottled shade near a story-and-a-half high concrete structure the size of a small home which may house electrical or mechanical equipment. It blocks the breeze. My back hurts if I sit here too long. (I know from other times I sat here when I was a student.)

This scarcity of seating is of course not tragic. But it speaks to an alienation here between the needs of so many of the people who work and learn here and the people who make most of the decisions, but have their own tables and seats and spaces to suit their needs and desires far better than these suit the majority’s. And it speaks not only to manufactured scarcities, but to waste and weird contrasts. Multimillion dollar building remodels, but no tables can be moved from the barren concrete area to places where people would actually use them.  Fresh air and beautiful days are wasted when people retreat indoors to find a place to sit to do their reading and writing. Friendships that might have formed outside...

During my time here, I often found it difficult to find places to sit and talk with people. Maybe the upper layer did not want us to loiter too long and get the mistaken impression that this place belonged to us. In the icy winters, we sometimes sat on floors against the walls in buildings with vast wide open spaces for tables and chairs. Couldn’t the metal tables be placed in there? Where are they stored during winter? 

There are many trees; spreads of green grass (which you might sit on – but mind the signs telling you that poison has recently been applied again to kill the weeds); walkways; classic Greek-style buildings (one of them just had a $32 million remodel); and even tables and benches. If you don’t linger, and you don’t try to find a place to sit, it looks appealing. If you don’t need shelter from the sun or cold, you may find it charming, driving by.

If you don’t need an abiding welcome or friendship here, then walking through may elicit from you some yearnings for your own bygone college days or your stereotypes about what college would have been like, had you gone.

It is only two-and-a-half years since I graduated from here.

After the thesis defense, as I slowly made my way out of the room after congratulating my friend, I got stuck near a professor while I waited to walk out of the door. For my second to last and then last semesters, I was in two of his classes, both small. His eyes landed on me with a look of startled recognition; he then looked away quickly, then turned himself around facing away. I’d always felt that he disliked me when I was in his classes. Still, I found it strange that he wouldn't even just say, "Hey, Lucy, how're you doing?" as a quick casual greeting. I didn't feel overtly upset, at least not at all like those things used to upset me when I was a student here. But it made me finally, fully accept that I don’t like this man.

Scarcities of respect; scarcities of real kindness; scarcities of an ability to value other perspectives and lives that don’t fit well enough into some people’s bland, neat little parameters.

I am tired of giving people like him the benefit of the doubt.

[And yet, a day later, copying this from my notebook, I feel myself slide again into: “What if he just didn’t recognize me? What if he thought that I didn’t like him? What if he had something else on his mind?”]

 For most of my life, I’ve separated from my own perspective too much, as if I could somehow be (or had a responsibility to be) omniscient. Even if people acted cold or disdainful or mean toward me, I would see them separate from that to some extent. I’d think, well, maybe I'm just not their kind of person; maybe I remind them of someone they had a bad experience with; maybe they think I don’t like them. That may stem from all the years I lived with so many people, and from reading so much, and from knowing that so many people are convinced they’re right when they’re sometimes so wrong. What if I’m wrong? And everyone has reasons and stories. But now, I want to stay attached to myself. I’m not omniscient. 

Because of these personal tendencies and my own position when I was a student in that university, I struggled with how to stand up for myself, even inside my own mind.

Scarcities of true, abiding relationships there – relationships I could count on – real friends. That was particularly true my first three semesters there. I felt both alone and conspicuous. I hated being the only ‘nontraditional’ student in most of my classes. When I went back for the second half – the other three semesters – all of that got better. But the friendships I made were with people who like me were not granted full citizenship rights. From the administration’s view, we were there to pay tuition or exploit as cheap labor.  Customers or wage-slaves. There were so many more of us than of them, but there was a scarcity of understanding for how deeply problematic the situation was, and a scarcity of belief that anything could be done, and a scarcity of interest in developing our collective strength and taking our university from the layer who have appropriated it.

And now writing the day after I was there:

The upcoming plan for that research 1 university is to make it more elitist. Acceptance there is set to become an even scarcer resource in 2015. The administrative dictators want more students from out of state so they can charge them higher tuition. In turn, students from this state can go elsewhere and take out even larger student loans. Instead of paying $50,000 for four years of BA instruction at this so-called public university, they can pay $80,000 or $100,000 somewhere else. Or they can try to go to the four-year state institution that won’t have enough space to accommodate a new mass of students who can’t get into our “public” university.

More students may find themselves far away from everyone they have ties to, as grad students and professors are likewise more than ever ripped away from their family, old friends, communities they grew up in.

In Debt: the First 5000 Years, David Graeber writes:

To be a slave was to be plucked from one’s family, kin, friends, and community, stripped of one’s name, identity, and dignity; and of everything that made one a person rather than a mere human machine capable of understanding orders. Neither were most slaves offered much opportunity to develop enduring human relations (155).

In a human economy, each person is unique, and of incomparable value, because each is a unique nexus of relations with others. A woman may be a daughter, sister, lover, rival, companion, mother, age-mate, and mentor to many different people in different ways (158.

[T]o make a human being an object of exchange, one woman equivalent to another for example, requires first of all ripping her from her context; that is, tearing her away from that web of relations that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is, and thus, into a means to measure debt (159).

I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable – that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt. Slavery is just the logical end-point, the most extreme form of such disentanglement. (163)

Are we being educated into slavery? 

Freedom becomes even more of a scarcity under these conditions. People aren’t free to choose to study what they want to study, or to stay near loved ones, sharing what they learn, or to make choices that cannot be made when they owe $50,000 or $100,000 in student loan debt.

Graeber again:

The meaning of the Roman word libertas itself changed dramatically over time. As everywhere in the ancient world, to be “free” meant, first and foremost, not to be a slave. Since slavery means above all the annihilation of social ties and the ability to form them, freedom meant the capacity to make and maintain moral commitments to others. The English word for “free,” for instance, is derived from a German root meaning “friend,” since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a community of equals” (203).

I love this. To be free is to be able to make friends.

Scarcities of freedom and friendship abound at my former university. This helps prepare us for scarcities of freedom and friendship in our larger society, all tied to other scarcities. 

On my way out, I detoured through one of the old classical buildings where my American literature class used to meet in a big lecture hall in spring semester of 2010. I looked through the door’s glass into the empty room with the lights on. And I saw the ghosts of better possibilities. In the midst of all the constraints to keep us unfree – to prevent us from forming and keeping old and new webs of sustained relations – we were more in there than they tried to force us into being. Maybe one day, we’ll cut the chains on the tables and move them as it suits us, free to make and keep and sit with friends in OUR university. Scarcity will give way to generosity and abundance.