Stupidity--Haze--Ball pit--Bees

In view of a cynical conversation I had with a decent fellow today, I've scrapped the embryonic plan for this entry in favour of a loose, rambling account of how meritocracy at university is all but dead.

I remember, many months ago, I saw a movie on stupidity, which stated "we have thousands of universities, billions of books, the world at our fingertips through our information superhighway. Why, then, are we so stupid?". At first this struck me as exaggeration and an expression of some foreign bitterness, but now I am beginning to see the deep roots from which this argument has sprung. Maybe it's my second-year letdown, maybe some sort of wisdom being injected into me, but I feel more and more like I come to this area of the city, float through hardly interacting with anyone (in the course of my academic duties), and in three or four years I will receive a piece of paper after having dumped about $20,000 into the coffers of an institution I feel I neither understand nor care for. This piece of paper will tell employers "he's under our protection", in a very similar vein as an extortion racket. Doesn't matter how smart you are, you need this paper; you have a nice brain, lots of ideas; it would be a shame if such a brain ended up freezing to death on a frigid winter night after being unable to procure a livelihood, and, more immediately, a hot-air vent. Or so the registrar's letter goes, unless I'm wrong.

A high school teacher put it best: "let's face facts; no matter what economy we're in or what historical period we're in or what our technology level is, there will always be two essential jobs: taking care of the dead, and taking care of children." This is one of the outgrowths of this sentiment: our huge multi-billion dollar, high-fi, glamorous, glittering, bombastic playpen. The "ism"s that bounce off the walls during lectures are more similar to the individual balls of a ball pit than we care to acknowledge.

More and more there is the feeling that all I have read and all the sheets I've filled out and all the blue booklets I've scrawled in and all the gleaming hardcover textbooks I bought are as real as a conversation over the internet. One is left wondering: "did this actually happen?", "how could it have happened? It must have been magic". Lectures are becoming shows of smoke and mirrors and people getting sawed in half to please the audience. More and more lectures themselves become extraneous. Maybe they should move the university entirely onto the internet; it might resolve this feeling of displaced here-ness, if that makes any sense at all. Why do I need to commute if I can make my presence felt--or, more likely, not felt--around the would in an instant?

This ignores the social aspects of the university, its one possible saving grace. To all my friends, and indeed all non-automatic human beings: you make this place bearable. As if that needed to be said.

I still haven't gotten to how meritocracy is dead. We have to face the facts: most of us are here because we are rich. Relatively rich compared to the world. If we can afford to spend money on alcohol (God bless it), then I am clearly not quite struggling for survival. After we are out and we have poured our money in here, we will have the means of keeping ourselves rich because our big nanny, the university, will look out for us in its own impersonal way. And so on until we spin out somehow. Of course, I'm oversimplifying as always. That should be a given, otherwise I'd never be able to work up the nerve to write anything.

Consider: "how the person who is kicking your chair from behind during lecture is not doing so accidentally. How all the TAs that you really like and are inspired by are in it for the money. How professors "teach" your class so that they can get funding for their own egos (research). How the university bureaucrat is the queen bee."