Empire of Illusion (16 page)

“Political silence. That's my summary. There are only flickers of resistance to most here-and-now issues,” says Chris Hebdon, an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley. Hebdon went on to describe how various student groups gather at Sproul Plaza, the historic center of student activity at Berkeley. Groups set up tables to recruit and inform other students, a practice known as “tabling.”

“Students table for Darfur, but seldom, if ever, do I see a table on Iraq, Afghanistan, or militarization. Tables on Sproul Plaza are ethnically fragmented and explicitly pre-professional, the [ethnicity-of-your-choice] -American Pre-Law, Pre-Med, Engineering, or Business
Association). There are strict restrictions and permitting processes for tabling. You see few, if any, tables on globalization, corporatization, or, heaven forbid, the commercialization of Berkeley. Too many students and professors are distracted, specialized, atomized, and timid. They follow trends, prestige, and money, and so rarely act outside the box. You know, U.C. adores the slogan ‘Excellence Through Diversity,' but it doesn't mention multiculturalism's silent partner—the fragmentation of student society into little markets, segmenting the powerful sea of students into diverse but disarmed droplets. Exemplifying this disorientation is Sproul Plaza—the same place Mario Savio once gave his rallying cry for the Free Speech Movement from atop a police car—now composed of tens of tables for sports, entertainment, ethnic associations, résumé-building clubs for corporate careerists, and small causes. Disconnection prevails. In the absence of cohesion, one really wonders how such smart kids could be struck so, in the muting sense of the term, dumb.”

The corporate hierarchy that has corrupted higher education is on public display at Berkeley. The wealthiest of the elite schools, such as Yale and Stanford, assign dormitories by lottery. They treat their students with a careful egalitarianism, expecting all to enter the elite. Berkeley and many other public universities, however, assign rooms depending on how much a student can pay. They fall into a capitalist logic of “choice.”
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The poorer Berkeley students end up in residences known as “the units” (Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 3), while the wealthier students and recruited athletes, sustained by family money or athletic scholarships, receive rooms at Foothill or Clark Kerr, a fancy Stanford-style dorm that was once a private school for deaf and blind children. The food is better at the more expensive dorms. Corporations have cut deals with universities to be sole providers of goods and services and to shut out competitors. Coca-Cola, for example, has monopoly rights at Berkeley, including control of what drinks and food are sold at football games. Corporations such as Cingular and Allstate blanket California Memorial Stadium with their logos and signs.

Berkeley negotiated a deal with British Petroleum for $500 million. BP gets access to the university's researchers and technological capacity, built by decades of public investment, to investigate biofuels at a new Energy Biosciences Institute. BP can shut down another research center
and move into a publicly subsidized one. BP will receive intellectual property rights, which it can use for profit, on scientific breakthroughs expected to come out of the joint project.

“When it comes to football, I go to Tightwad Hill, a no-cost site perched above the stadium where people can bring beers and laugh, rather than just hoot and scream,” says Hebdon. “The crowd on Tightwad represents a Bay Area variety—students, grandparents, alcoholics, sports-families, children—and there is a culture of uncoordinated neighborly fun. The relative freedom at Tightwad contrasts to the neo-Pavlovian crowd training that goes on in the stadium below. In the stadium you are inundated. It begins right at the door. Tickets cost upwards of $25, you must enter with no food, and you must buy high-priced Coke or its underlings, Dasani water or Minute Maid juice.”

The football coach is Berkeley's highest-paid employee. He makes about $3 million. Tuition has been steadily rising for decades. U.C. undergraduate students pay 100 percent of their educational costs because the state subsidy has effectively disappeared.
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By the U.C. charter, tuition at the University of California is supposed to be free. Berkeley is a microcosm of the intrusion of corporations into education. Education, at least an education that challenges assumptions and teaches students to be self-critical, has been sacrificed in a Faustian bargain. Charles Schwartz, an emeritus professor of physics, drew up a chart that showed that in the last fourteen years, from 1993 to 2007, management staffs increased 259 percent. The total of employees increased 24 percent. Fulltime faculty increased by 1 percent.

When the U.C. Regents, who oversee the university system, announced they wouldn't accept thousands of qualified freshmen because of a budget shortfall, Schwartz drew up a plan. In the spirit of public service rather than personal enrichment, he proposed that the university take 1 percent from the salary of each employee making more than $100,000. This is not unprecedented. Weeks earlier, Barack Obama had capped his staffs' salaries at $100,000. “That would net you $29 million,” Schwartz told the Regents. “That is more than enough to cover the full costs for those 2,300 new students that you were planning to turn away next year.” The Regents ignored him.
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“Berkeley is trying to brand itself through its athletics, especially football,” Hebdon tells me. “The program is a tremendous investment.
Our chancellor, in an act of great misdirection, just announced he plans to raise $1 billion for the athletic endowment by selling off 3,000 front-row seats for thirty to fifty years to private bidders for $225,000 a pop.
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Piece by piece, Berkeley is becoming a trade school. Students, for instance, mostly agree with the idea of a sports university.”

In December 2006, the university announced plans to cut down more than forty huge oak trees on a 1.5-acre site on campus to build a training facility for athletes. A group of protesters built crude tree houses in the branches and took shifts manning them to thwart the plan. Berkeley municipal law prohibits removing any Coast Live Oak with a trunk larger than six inches within city boundaries, but city boundaries do not include the university. The protest lasted for twenty-one months until September 2008, when the last protesters were coaxed down and the grove was demolished.

“During the well-publicized, two-year tree sits, most students supported the university's plans to build the sporting complex and railed against ‘the hippies,'” Hebdon says. “One student, a war veteran, was treated as an imminent threat for tree-sitting with a sign that read ‘Democratize the U.C. Regents.' Few students knew that the Regents, who oversee the whole university system, are appointed rather than elected and representative, even though this is required by law. Few really dug in and thought. My strongest memory is of a person selling rocks to throw at tree sitters. He had noticeable crowd support. When I see things like this, I think of how Berkeley, once known for conscientious objection, is training an inhumane, deeply frustrated, indifferent, game-driven people. The military has a strong presence on campus and is one of the few ways for students to pay their way without accruing large debt.

“We have bought hook, line, and sinker into the idea that education is about training and ‘success,' defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge,” Hebdon goes on. “The competitive efficiency culture—electronic immersion, high-paced everything, career networking as a way of life, prestige, money—it disconnects the so-called best and the brightest from commonsense obligations to society, ecology, and democratic ideals. Somewhere along the way into the free market, Berkeley forgot that learning isn't about handshaking, résumé fondling, and market rewards.”

“What makes Berkeley a terribly contradictory public institution is its version of the wrought-iron gates that enclose Harvard or Yale: our high-security national laboratories. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, up the hill from campus, is a mystery to most. It is connected to U.C. Berkeley's historical involvement with nuclear technology, something inherently centralizing, undemocratic, and dangerous to civil rights. The labs have special buses students cannot ride. Buildings are restricted-access, and secrecy abounds. Researcher scientists do not fancy whistle-blowing, as they have no legal right to tenure. Students learn these labs are prestigious. After all, labs pull in copious amounts of taxpayer-funded federal science dollars.”

I sat with a classmate from Harvard Divinity School who is now a theology professor. When I asked her what she was teaching, she unleashed a torrent of arcane academic jargon. I had no idea, even with three years of seminary, what she was talking about. You can see this retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in every academic department and discipline across the country. The more these universities churn out these stunted men and women, the more we are flooded with a peculiar breed of specialist who uses obscure code words as a way to avoid communication. This specialist blindly services tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she has never been taught to question. Specialists look down on the rest of us, who do not understand what they are talking and writing about, with thinly veiled contempt.

By any standard comprehensible within the tradition of Western civilization, as John Ralston Saul points out, these people are illiterate. They cannot recognize the vital relationship between power and morality. They have forgotten, or never knew, that moral traditions are the product of civilization. They have little or no knowledge of their own civilization and do not know, therefore, how to maintain it. “One of the signs of a dying civilization,” Saul writes, “is that its language breaks down into exclusive dialects which prevent communication. A growing, healthy civilization uses language as a daily tool to keep the machinery of society moving. The role of responsible, literate elites is to aid and abet that communication.”
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Our elites use a private dialect that is a barrier to communication as well as common sense. The corporate con artists and economists who have rigged our financial system continue to speak to us in the obscure and incomprehensible language coined by specialists on Wall Street and at elite business schools. They use terms such as
securitization
,
deleveraging
,
structured investment vehicles,
and
credit default swaps
to shut us out of the debate. This retreat by elites into specialized ghettos spans the range of academic disciplines. English professors, who see novels as divorced from society, speak in the obscure vocabulary of deconstructionism, disempowering and emasculating the very works they study. Writers from Euripides to Russell Banks have used literature as both a mirror and a lens, to reflect back to us, and focus us on, our hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice. Literature is a tool to enlighten societies about its ills. It was Charles Dickens who directed the attention of middle-class readers to the slums and workhouses of London. It was Honoré de Balzac who, through the volumes of his
Human Comedy
, ripped open the callous heart of France. It was Sinclair Lewis who took us into the stockyards and shantytowns of Chicago in
The Jungle
.

In the hands of academics, however, who rarely understand or concern themselves with the reality of the world, works of literature are eviscerated and destroyed. They are mined for obscure trivia and irrelevant data. This disconnect between literature and philosophy on one hand and the real on the other is replicated in most academic disciplines. Economists build elaborate theoretical models yet know little of John Law, have never closely examined the tulip crisis, and do not study the railroad bubbles or the deregulation that led to the Great Depression. The foundation of Athenian democracy rose out of the egalitarian social and political reforms of Solon, including his decision to wipe out all of the debts that were bankrupting Athenian citizens. But the study of the classics, because it is not deemed practical or useful in a digitalized world, leaves such vital lessons unexamined. Tacitus' account of the economic meltdown during the reign of Tiberius—a meltdown that also saw widespread bankruptcies, a collapse of the real estate market, and financial ruin—is a reminder that we are not unique to history or human behavior. The meltdown during Tiberius' reign was finally halted by massive government spending and intervention
that included interest-free loans to citizens. Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past, remain children. They live in an illusion.