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Assembly-line education

If you aren't being graduated this May, skip this column. Read Bapat instead.

But for those of you who have finished all of your requirements and will be flipping your tassel Saturday (I am one of you), now would be a good time to reflect on what your years at the University of Arizona mean to you: What did you learn? How are you different than you were four or however many years ago? The answers may surprise you.

Many of you depart UA with plenty of happy memories and a degree hopefully translatable into a lucrative, steady job. Which, of course, is what you expected when you enrolled in the university fresh out of high school. Tuition, textbooks, living expenses ... these are all considerable investments, and you understandably want a return on that investment.

But at one time, a college education wasn't only an "investment." It's always been a way to get a better job, but it also used to mean more than that. A university-educated person used to be a well-rounded person, one with a broad base of knowledge to draw from throughout life. The ability to critically think about issues and events was considered a desirable end in its own right.

Now, most students disdain having to learn anything more than that which will directly win them a job. "Do we need to know this for the test?" now competes with "How am I going to use this at my job?" as the question that most infuriates professors.

Any thought or theory that questions the system students in which students will eventually work causes particular discomfort to students. Consider the anti-sweatshop protests last spring, or this semester. Responses ranged from support, to apathy to anger as students questioned not why the UA relied on sweatshop labor for their athletic apparel, but why they should be bothered with the oppression of others. That Nike should have the right to exploit workers in other countries is beyond question to many students. It's the way the system works to get them the brand name gear they want.

Although the tendency would be to blame students for this almost mercenary attitude towards education, their attitudes merely reflect a larger cultural attitude that reduces everything to a commodity. An education no longer is something one earns through hard work, but something one buys. And, as the customer is always right, the university should tailor its offerings to only what students want or believe they will need to get a job when they matriculate.

Some have argued that academia is in the midst of a "revolution" in education, away from a system based on knowledge imparted by learned professors, to one based on direct student interaction with the material. While this certainly sounds good, as people tend to learn material better if they feel more connected to it, it doesn't bode well in our current cultural environment. It could very easily become a further strategy in the commodification of American culture, as students pick to "connect" to only those theories and bodies of knowledge likely to get them a good job.

In other words, this form of "student-based" education would shift the university's role further away from providing students with a broad range of knowledge to apply to a variety of experiences, to producing "human capital," individuals with highly defined bodies of knowledge marketable to the corporations that quietly control cultural life. Universities would in effect operate as elite trade schools, educating students not so much to think critically, but pragmatically about improving the structures that maintain a materialist way of life.

That UA administrators have positively discussed the revolution without evidently considering the desirability of that change demonstrates how deeply the culture of commodification has infiltrated the halls of academia. To some extent, they, too, see the role of the university to produce "human capital," not provide educational challenges to well-rounded students.

So think about that when you move your tassel and accept your diploma. You haven't been graduated, you've been produced. We're not the Class of 2000. We're Graduates 2000: New and Improved, ready to perform dutifully for corporate America.

Deron Overpeck will graduate with a Masters in Media Arts. He can be reached at Deron.Overpeck@wildcat.arizona.edu.