Big Fish, Small Pond, Global Ocean

The Brands Flashing up in your Eyes will Blind you to Love and Home

I earned a bachelor’s degree from Florida Atlantic University — heard of it? It’s a big public commuter-friendly university in South Florida, founded in 1961 on a former Army Airfield built on land seized from Japanese pineapple farmers during the second world war. People joked that “FAU” stood for “find another university,” but it was driving distance and I liked it. And I learned a lot.

While I was there, a brilliant classmate shared the details of an advising session with me: she told her advisor she wanted the best education she could possibly get. He replied that you could get a “Harvard-quality” education right at FAU, just take these classes with these professors. I met her in one of those classes, and we both had the same idea: education wasn’t “a brand” — it wasn’t a very expensive university t-shirt you wore — it was a journey that built up inside you and out, something that gave back to you in intangible and unquantifiable ways, and in proportion to how much you committed yourself.

Today I’m a professor teaching at Drake University — heard of it? It’s a small, private, non-profit university in the Midwest, founded in 1881. If you’ve only heard the name in passing, you probably like sports or politics — presidential primary debates have often been held in Drake’s Sheslow auditorium, and in 1951, a black Drake student, a football player named Johnny Bright, was sucker-punched on-field during an away game in Oklahoma, and a photo sequence of the attack, taken by Des Moines Register photographers, won a Pulitzer Prize. It doesn’t un-break anyone’s jaw, but Drake now has a college named for Mr. Bright.

Whether founded in 1961, 1881, 1636, or 1209 universities have histories, histories will include atrocities, and living people have to deal with that. If your college has a collection of stolen cultural objects — or even human bodies! — don’t freak out, but do try to make it right.

At Drake our students are often brilliant and go on to do amazing things. Nothing stops them from getting the best quality education imaginable right here in Des Moines, Iowa — and like all of us, they will grow in proportion to how much they give. But I would never, today, tell someone you could get a “Harvard-quality” education here, because Harvard(TM) doesn’t signify what it once did. Harvard, as a “brand,” once implied to our (perhaps naive) young student minds, “high quality” — like “Gucci” or something? …So maybe we were always just one handbag dissection away from losing trust in academia’s ultimate imprimatur?

Of course the game’s always been rigged, and while idealists will be found earning PhDs, failing Freshman Comp, or fishing tampons out of your septic tank, you’ll find the cunning social climbers more exclusively in the upper realms, because that’s what they’re there for. I wanted education, not advancement. I’d still be just as educated educating? (I am not done, I am a work in progress!) if I worked on a fishing boat — maybe more so.

We have to keep reminding young people that college will actually benefit them — oh, look, here’s another reminder published today! — but only because our culture chugs out so much obfuscating smoke when it comes to education. Education is rarely framed as something you do because it’s awesome; it’s usually framed as something you have to do to get something awesome, or maybe even to avoid something bad.

Some people have developed a reflexive sneer triggered by mention of elite institutions, and many young people reject the idea of going to college entirely as an “elitist” venture. The cunning social climbers are the only ones not turned off by social climbing! It’s like people are giving up on recreational b-ball because when they try to enjoy a pickup game they’re endlessly reminded — taunted! — by onlookers that they’ll never play in the NBA. But basketball is fun and good for you and you should still play it, even if it never makes you a dime.

Our attitude towards the “best” and “brightest” and “biggest” and “boldest” has gotten bogged down by the “flattened” information-based world. In the bygone world where every city and town needed its bands and cover bands, music was alive. But in this world, where every musician from everywhere must conquer the same one or two algorithms to be heard by anyone/everyone, music ossifies. Even more tragically, would-be musicians give up before they’ve develop their talent, because why torment yourself when there’s 8 billion people on Earth and only a handful of people get to be seen or heard by the rest?

(The ones who persist are the ones who have an answer for that: I will “torment” myself because I love it, because I need it, because I am not ME if I do not create…)

The idealistic view of escaping geography and “flattening” the world was that we’d get a total democratization of content — your song is as likely to be heard as Michael Jackson’s. All the world’s a slush pile, and everyone’s a first-reader. That didn’t last long. Now algorithms are your first readers, and sure, maybe they’re completely biased due to the Mysteries of the Training Data, but at least this bullshit exercise reduced the overwhelm of the information overload your mind struggled to take in. Quick as a flash we returned to hierarchies and gate-keepers, but this time they’re disguised as the digital “environment,” and immortal as well as unaccountable.

Why not become cynical? You should develop a reflexive sneer. Where once you could physically move through your community, find a place where you could imagine a future for yourself, and work to make that reality happen among the fellow humans you could know and understand as well as they could know and understand you, now you’re asked to submit a resume to a machine and compete with the abstracted data of everyone in the world.

The global human network is inhumane. It sorts us into groups of people like us, no matter where in the world, so that we lose our sense of our uniqueness in our communities — of our value to our communities. Wherever you live needs someone like you. Whether you’re a saint or a jerk or a joker or whatever, it really does take all kinds.

A geographically defined community might end up with an Andy, a Bessie, a Carl, and a Dora, four people who would’ve worked well together by complementing one another’s strengths; the global network divides them in a global group of Andys — Andy’s People! — a global group of Bessies — no one understands a Bessie but a Bessie — a group of Carls — Carls need a safe place to “be Carl” — and a group of Doras — because Doras just can’t speak freely, except when it’s just other Doras around! And now all the Andys are attacking the Doras, and the Carls are insulting the Bessies, and it’s just a big fucking mess.

Where all is signal, nothing is substance. Identity as a person, personhood, even ensoulment, becomes mere identitarian membership in a group. Educations become allegiances, memberships, because brand-loyalty is valuable “data” while knowledge and experience and skill and care, and the unique perspective you bring the world that no one else possibly could? Those things are not easily converted to cash.

If you see education as just a “badge,” just an affirmation (from authority) of worth, that means it is not the education but the status that matters. You’re in the realm of the social climbers and you’re having to play by their rules.

We are foolish to dismiss the “big fish in a small pond” — the person who does well because they’re not in competition with a larger lake full of specimens higher on the food chain. You could be a blue whale in this global ocean and fail to stand out or compete. High-speed, high-intenisty global information and social networks make One Big Crowded Pond of the entire planet. How does anyone attain a solid social position without some shores and riverbanks to limit the range?

Imagine believing that you must get into an “Ivy” or you are a failure. Imagine believing it’s better to be just another overachiever in the land of overachievers — a place where everyone’s so clever and talented that accept/reject decisions are made based on nuances of “personality” as perceived by admissions officers, as meaningful as a flip of a coin (and possibly just disguised biases) — than to possess a unique role and identity in a place that you care about, and which cares about you?

It’s time to let the global ocean recede a bit, to find our tide pools and grottoes and lagoons. Human life is not about competing with everyone on Earth. Human life is not about knowing about or connecting with everyone on Earth. We need our towns and our countries. We need our states and our cities. Let’s be provicial: we need to care what our letter-carriers, baristas, and next-door neighbors think.

People act starved for attention because we discount attention paid us by the humans in our vicinity to near-worthlessness, while attention paid to us by distant “brands” at untold “scale” are shockingly over-valued. We do these things unthinkingly, and we bring ourselves pain and misery.

And as an aside, I have serious doubts that most Ivy-league students could survive community college. I’ve read many syllabuses of people who teach at these “lower-tier” 2 year colleges, and it’s common to find downright draconian course structures and policies. While students in the higher echelons get “the benefit of the doubt,” are “given grace,” and have their personal lives and mental health woes taken seriously, community college students are told, right on the syllabus, that a dropped quotation mark is plagiarism and automatic failure, that time management is your problem and late papers are not accepted, and miss more than three classes and you fail the course: no excuses.

Community college students are demographically distinct from “traditional” college students, often working full-time jobs, having pressing family obligations, and other big things happening in their lives. So you’d think if any thumb would be put on a scale, it would be for them, but actually, no one’s even thinking about them, they’re thinking about themselves: community college instructors are over-worked and under-paid, and one of the few ways they can take control of their workload is by pressuring students to withdraw from their classes before they submit too much work — so instead of 150 papers to grade every few weeks, the instructor could get it down to 80 or 90, by ruthlessly weeding out as many students as they can.

Community college survival is a truer test of one’s mettle than Harvard admissions. Get yourself educated when no one is supporting you, no one cares if you learn but you, and the entire system is jacked against you. If you’re a single parent caring for a diabetic mom, working two jobs and going to college, earning an AA represents a level of diligence, thoughtfulness, hazard-avoidance, and self-control far beyond the typical Yale BA. But how many people are going to acknowledge that? How many people are even going to stop and listen to you speak, to understand the content of your character?

I am a passionately curious thinker and creator who lives for intellectual discovery, and I am so glad that I never got “a Harvard(TM) education” — I am so glad that I got a community college education, followed by a commuter college education, followed by a “working” MFA, and I’m grateful for all of the detours and byways and dead-ends I followed as I took the long, long, long way. “Finishing” is not the goal. The rush to “finish” is a death-wish, an unhealthy compulsion to end the uncertainty that is the very wonder of life itself.

Treasure the smaller schools, the less-well-known schools, and the educations that happen there. And treasure the curious souls who seek to broaden their minds in these places not for prizes or certifications, but for love of wisdom, life, and the world we share together. It is not only “high end luxury brand” educations that count — educations on the fishing boat or factory floor can be just as vast and twice as deep.

Let’s all care a little less what’s happening “at Harvard” and give more respect to the everyday intellectuals who finish their shift, rush home to change mom’s catheter, and then settle in for three hours of Western Civ, not because they have designs on the White House or Wall Street, but because learning about the world with other humans matters and is good.