I live in Seattle. These are things that catch my attention, pique my
interest and/or make me want to pass notes in class like a 7th
grader
politicalprof: I didn’t write this, but I wish I had. It’s from a graduating senior at the University of North Carolina. Brilliant.
BY CHRISTOPHER SOPHER
CHAPEL HILL — A poster once hung in the guidance office of my high school, comparing the type of car I would supposedly own if I went to college and if I didn’t. If I didn’t go, I would get an ancient, threadbare sedan of the sort millions of freshly licensed 16-year-olds receive from their parents. If I did go, I got an oceanfront house with two pristinely restored muscle cars in the garage.
Since I first saw that poster, I’ve come quite a way - geographically, educationally, emotionally. As a native Virginian, I’ve come to love North Carolina and its deep, abiding commitment to the promise of education, higher education in particular. But as I prepare to graduate from the University of North Carolina this weekend, I’ve grown concerned about the future of that commitment amid the confusing, competing tides of economic and political change.
My high school’s poster reflects how we talk about college to students: an investment in your future; a period of monetary cost now for great economic return later; a door to a better life. Every incoming student arrives armed with the promising knowledge that college graduates make one or two million dollars more over their lifetimes than do high school graduates. All these things are true. But they also miss the point.
Education isn’t like remodeling a bathroom or buying index funds. It’s an investment, sure, but not a strictly economic one. It’s an investment in young people, with our many fascinations and flaws and futures.
Here and on campuses everywhere, most students and faculty understand and treasure this fact, frustratingly impervious as it is to the immediate needs of our economy or our politics. I wish desperately that our public discourse would understand and treasure it, too.
I’ve never had a professor begin class by announcing the global economic importance of studying “Measure for Measure” or the long-term public benefit of knowing organic chemistry. The university has educated me for me, with the distant and difficult-to-measure hope that I one day pay forward the favor in civic participation and economic productivity.
We can’t run universities as factories, calculating the cost of inputs and the market value of outputs. People aren’t widgets. Even if they were, the human capital market will change drastically between now and the peak of students’ future productivity.
The public debate about higher education seems often to forget that between high school graduation and eventual employment as a doctor, programmer or malnourished graduate student, life moves on for students. We meet people, encounter new ideas, explore paths we’d never considered. We learn to live with and around each other. While the system is busy trying to imprint us with preparation for the “future jobs” of the moment, we are busy being people.
This fact holds the potential for a deeper education that recognizes earning a degree is about more than preparing for a career. That potential is already being tapped at many of our universities, but there is more that can be done.
There exists a great deal of data on this subject, and a great many people smarter than I debating what it means in practice. But the data tell only part of the story. The students tell the rest.
When my peers and I don caps and gowns and graduate, the remarkable thing about it won’t be that we earned degrees, or learned applicable skills or assumed unbelievable amounts of per capita debt - though all these things are true. The remarkable thing about it will be that we got the incredible chance to learn in a place of unbridled possibility. That place is more than a training facility; it’s a place that teaches the inescapable truth that we are dependent on and connected to one another in countless ways.
From North Carolina’s commitment to higher education I’ve learned many things, from public policy analysis to journalism to the proper color of fire trucks. The most important thing, though, is that education helps us to be better - as citizens, as workers, as people. From that betterment comes the economic opportunity we love to advertise.
I’m not an economist or an educator or an expert on higher education. I am simply a student, and I don’t presume to speak for my peers except to say this: the opportunity to spend a few, far too short years in such a place is an immeasurably wonderful gift. And it is one this state should continue giving, in full and always.
For that gift, taxpaying citizens who have never met me and probably never will, I thank you. Regardless of what kind of car ends up in my garage.
Christopher Sopher is a graduating senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, from Annandale, Va. He majored in public policy and political science.
Americans did not become rich because of our rugged individualism or entrepreneurial drive or technical inventiveness. We were born rich. Ann Richards’ famous description of George Bush Sr. as an individual is equally applicable to the United States as a whole, “He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”
When asked to identify the single most important difference between the Old and New World, renowned historian Henry Steele Commager responded, in the New World your baby survived. The New World had an abundance of cheap land which meant the New World, unlike the Old World, was largely populated by self-reliant property owners. Coupled with a moderate climate and rich soil, immigrants could grow all the food needed for their families, livestock and horses. There was plenty of clean water and sufficient free or low cost wood to build and heat one’s house.
The fact that Americans could choose to live on a farm also gave them significant bargaining power with employers. As a result wages in the New World were much higher than in the Old World.
The United States also benefited enormously from tens of millions of immigrants who, through a Darwinian-like process of natural selection, were among the most driven and entrepreneurial and hardy of their native countries. And on the dark side of the immigration picture, we also benefited immensely from millions of involuntary immigrants who provided an army of unpaid labor for southern plantations.
(Source: azspot)
Teaching relatively class privileged students about why poor people can’t just pull themselves up by their bootstraps can be extremely challenging. One of the things that they harp on is their impression that the poor spend money on frivolous things; somehow they believe that, if the poor just eschewed cable television and Nikes, they would pop up into the middle class.
I try to explain to them that being poor is like living a life of self-denial. To be poor is to be forced to deny oneself constantly. The poor must deny themselves most trappings of an adult life (your own apartment, framed pictures on the walls, matching dishes), a comfortable life (a newish mattress, a comfy couch, good shoes that aren’t worn out), a convenient life (your own car, eating out), a self-directed life (a job you care for, leisure time, hobbies, money for babysitters), a life full of small pleasures (lattes, dessert, fresh cut flowers, hot baths, wine), a healthy life (fresh fruits and vegetables, health care, time for exercise), not to mention all of the must-have consumer goods that are constantly marketed to us (mp3 players, organic food, travel, expensive clothes and accessories). And, since most poor people remain poor their whole lives, they must be prepared to deny themselves (and members of their families) these things, perhaps, for the rest of their lives.
So when my students see someone (they think is) poor walking down the street with a brand new pair of Nikes, perhaps what they are seeing is someone who decided (whether out of a moment of weakness or not) to NOT deny themselves at least one thing; perhaps they are seeing someone who is trying to hold on to some feeling of normalcy; perhaps what they are seeing is a perfectly normal person who just wants what they want for once.
Lisa at Sociological Images: Poverty, Self-Denial, and New Nikes
Very well said.
(via azspot)
President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the Second Bill of Rights during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944.
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.
—
Audre Lorde (via ohfortheloveofdog)—
“The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” Danah Boyd (via somethingchanged)
This is obvious. What kind of bothers me is that this isn’t strictly an issue of self-selecting “early adopters,” as the author implies, starting with Ivy Leagues and spreading outward to the college bound and upwardly mobile. When facebook first started, it was restricted to Ivy Leagues and slowly but surely, other universities and colleges were added to their list and also given access. The most reputable and prestigious institutions, followed by the larger institutions, and then finally the smaller, less well-known institutions were given access…followed by high school students and then the general public. And while, yes, the wealthy and the educated were more likely to leave myspace for facebook, the reason for this was that, at least in the beginning, only the wealthy and the educated could leave myspace for facebook. Moreover, the debates that arose when facebook decided to open membership to the general public just further illustrate how controlled facebook was and how fiercely its members defended its “elite” status. Facebook was created specifically for a certain group of people, and for a long time, actively kept the Others out. It wasn’t just a choice. Facebook was, for a long time, the very exclusive country club of social networking.
(via robot-heart-politics)
While I understand there are a lot of issues at play here let’s not forget one other thing, MySpace is awful. MySpace is the AOL of social networking. It may have been a pioneer but now it just doesn’t keep pace.
thatswhatimsaying: molls: pams: buyhercandy: abbyjean
On a daily basis as a straight person…
- I can be pretty sure that my roomate, hallmates and classmates will be comfortable with my sexual orientation.
- If I pick up a magazine, watch TV, or play music, I can be certain my sexual orientation will be represented.
- When I talk about my heterosexuality (such as in a joke or talking about my relationships), I will not be accused of pushing my sexual orientation onto others.
- I do not have to fear that if my family or friends find out about my sexual orientation there will be economic, emotional, physical or psychological consequences.
- I did not grow up with games that attack my sexual orientation (IE fag tag or smear the queer).
- I am not accused of being abused, warped or psychologically confused because of my sexual orientation.
- I can go home from most meetings, classes, and conversations without feeling excluded, fearful, attacked, isolated, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, stereotyped or feared because of my sexual orientation.
- I am never asked to speak for everyone who is heterosexual.
- I can be sure that my classes will require curricular materials that testify to the existence of people with my sexual orientation.
- People don’t ask why I made my choice of sexual orientation.
- People don’t ask why I made my choice to be public about my sexual orientation.
- I do not have to fear revealing my sexual orientation to friends or family. It’s assumed.
- My sexual orientation was never associated with a closet.
- People of my gender do not try to convince me to change my sexual orientation.
- I don’t have to defend my heterosexuality.
- I can easily find a religious community that will not exclude me for being heterosexual.
- I can count on finding a therapist or doctor willing and able to talk about my sexuality.
- I am guaranteed to find sex education literature for couples with my sexual orientation.
- Because of my sexual orientation, I do not need to worry that people will harass me.
- I have no need to qualify my straight identity.
- My masculinity/femininity is not challenged because of my sexual orientation.
- I am not identified by my sexual orientation.
- I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help my sexual orientation will not work against me.
- If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has sexual orientation overtones.
- Whether I rent or I go to a theater, Blockbuster, an EFS or TOFS movie, I can be sure I will not have trouble finding my sexual orientation represented.
- I can walk in public with my significant other and not have people double-take or stare.
- I can choose to not think politically about my sexual orientation.
- I do not have to worry about telling my roommate about my sexuality. It is assumed I am a heterosexual.
- I can remain oblivious of the language and culture of LGBTQ folk without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
- I can go for months without being called straight.
- I’m not grouped because of my sexual orientation.
- My individual behavior does not reflect on people who identity as heterosexual.
- In everyday conversation, the language my friends and I use generally assumes my sexual orientation. For example, sex inappropriately referring to only heterosexual sex or family meaning heterosexual relationships with kids.
- People do not assume I am experienced in sex (or that I even have it!) merely because of my sexual orientation.
- I can kiss a person of the opposite gender on the heart or in the cafeteria without being watched and stared at.
- Nobody calls me straight with maliciousness.
- People can use terms that describe my sexual orientation and mean positive things (IE “straight as an arrow”, “standing up straight” or “straightened out”) instead of demeaning terms (IE “ewww, that’s gay” or being “queer”).
- I am not asked to think about why I am straight.
- I can be open about my sexual orientation without worrying about my job.
—
excerpt from the Blue Scholars tour blog. For those of you who think no one says stuff like this anymore…they do. Can’t wait to see them again 9/27 at the showbox!