In the beginning, DFW tells the graduates the standard commencement speeches given by individuals who attempt to show the value of a liberal arts education is not a passé attempt to justify four years of paying college tuition, but something deeper than what appears on the surface, something about how to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
To most critical observers, higher education in America is in a pretty bad place at the moment. Tuition at state universities continues to raise while programs in the arts and humanities suffer a fate that resembles death due to being underfunded. For-profit schools like the University of Phoenix have made astronomical profits through exploitation by marketing their vocational-based educational programs to society's least educated. The fraud of for-profit colleges starts with grandiose promises of employment in profitable and emerging industries after graduation. The television commercials for these schools feature bright eyed people of all races, genders, and ages who want to get on the fastback and move ahead with a promising career. The worst part is whether or not a student at these diploma mills graduates they are still stuck with paying back student huge loans, meaning your federal tax dollars are subsidizing the profits of the University of Phoenix every time it snatches either a Pell Grant or Federal Direct Loan from a single mother with a GED and three kids to support who is tired of being poor or some stupid schmuck who thought his 40,000 dollar associates degree in computer networking would make him a millionaire. And as long as employment continues to be a dismal prospect, the education ponzi scheme committed by these for-profit education S&P 500 companies like the Apollo Group, who own the University of Phoenix will continue to flourish. The narrative that continues to be replayed involves a depressed economy that has no bearing on the record profits made by the elites who run the biggest banks and own the companies that outsourced American jobs overseas, in the process threatening the cultural life and environment that is not our own. Our system is totalatarian in nature because resistance to what is unjust is met with acts of violence and police brutality. Take the Occupy Wall Street protests across the country as evidence of this repression of democracy.
There is no clear correlation between a doomed economy created by malfaseance and the points DFW makes in his commencement speech about the purpose of a liberal arts education, however, if the liberal arts tradition DFW rightly defends is replaced by a curriculum whose aim is to find employment in an already rotten industry, where class discussions about what it means to be a human being are phased out to make room for business classes, with business ethics only offered on Friday nights, our culture is one railroad stop away from Shithead City, a place where Michelle Bachman is the mayor and Bernie Madoff does your taxes.
Education, formal or informal, is what allows to the social change caused by popular indignation that stemmed from just actions to happen. This is always a rare occurrence. As Noam Chomsky pointed out once, "education is a period of regimentation and control, part of which involves direct indoctrination, providing a system of false beliefs." And this has been largely true ever since the industrial revolution in some capacity. The huge increase of high stake standardized testing in elementary and secondary schools and the noticeable presence of for-profit colleges that advertise in the middle of the work selling the idea that a better life is possible when you get certification in some vocation that you took tens of thousands of dollars in loans to cover tuition should not be a shocking surprise. If education is to be a means of social control, social marginalization, and cherry picking future middle-managers, accountants, and other white-collar cogs that carry out a corporate agendas, the traditional universities, funded by both public and private endowments, has a role to play when making sure the economic system continues to benefit the wealthy corporate elite by providing a place where in between learning some kind of academic discipline that you may or may not base a career, you take can do keg stands and take plenty of bong hits to sow a few wild oats as the cliche goes, because real soon you may be part of the professional or managerial class, no longer concerned about what you think, how you think, and how you construct meaning.
And at this point, after you've graduated from a four college or even stayed around an extra year or two to get a masters degree, after you took all those cool classes about Greek philosophy and the history of Asia and take bong hits with your buddies as you played Xbox, what DFW said during his commencement speech at Kenyon College is more relevant now than before.
In whatever position you have as a college educated professional, there may come a time when you have a moment to reflect about the world and how it works, not a conservation about politics with a co-worker about why or why not you're going to vote for Obama this coming November, nor is the conversation of about the economy and how it can get better...No, this moment of reflection goes beyond ideology and has a universal face of human suffering, leading you to think for just a few more moments you live and breathe not with autonomy but by the pulse of something so rotten, so pervasive and controlling, that the only ones who deserve your respect are those who actively oppose the stink and stand up for the interests of those who cannot. Your education has brought you to this fleeting moment, similar to the moment when the prisoner leaves Plato's cave and experiences the clarity of reality where truth is not political but an expression of human nature and its relation to the earth.
Since this moment is fleeting, your professional responsibilities quickly, much like before, is what consumes. You're the one-dimensional man Marcuse talked about.
If those people, the ones running the banks and major companies, the ones the Occupy Wall Street protesters stand in opposition to and the ones through a few degrees of separation you work for had actually stuck to the principals that were a part of their fancy elite university provided liberal arts education, our next stop on this train journey might not be Shithead City.
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