The Harvard of the Proletariat
Yesterday, I read a short article in The Paris Review written by a former CUNY student (not one of mine) about her experience studying Joyce's Ulysses at CCNY. The article recounted the transformative nature of her experience against the backdrop of the chronic (and criminal) underfunding of CUNY, and was ultimately a paean to public education. But there was a tone to the article that I found a little off-putting and that I think unintentionally captures an unwelcome truth about the American class system: our criticisms often serve to reinforce it.
For me, the problem was most evident in the following passage: "What a wreck the campus was; how happy we all were. Every evening, after class, I speed walked downhill toward the 137th Street 1 train, wired and vibrating with a distinct kind of joy that I’d never felt before and have never felt since. It was the joy of knowing—knowing with bone-deep certainty—that everything I’d ever heard about college was a lie, that the Ivy League was a scam, that nothing at Harvard could ever hold a candle to what was happening here in the Ulysses seminar at the crumbling City College of New York."
On the one hand, there is a lot with which I agree. I do think the Ivy League is largely a scam, acting more as a class gatekeeper than anything else, and I do think that the education you can receive at a public university is oftentimes (but not always) superior to that which you would receive at an “elite” private institution. I continue to abide by an understanding of education that sees it as truly transformative, but when you situate education within a social institution designed to reproduce class iniquities, there are some “truths” that are hard to question (let alone, to even identify). And this doesn’t make for a truly radical educational experience.
Conversely, at a public institution whose function is much different (not that it doesn’t also sometimes play a pernicious social role), discourse can be more open, if for no other reason than that the students aren’t rich. Granted, I found my own undergraduate institution to be terribly conservative, but this is because the role of the Ivy’s is fulfilled by certain “elite” public institutions in Canada, in much the same way that the U.S. also has some “public” Ivy’s. Nonetheless, when teaching in a space that isn’t concerned with helping students reproduce their class status, there is an added freedom in the classroom. Simply put (oversimply, I might add), students are there to learn why their life is so tough, not to justify why their life is so good.
If for no other reason, this kind of intellectual freedom makes the CUNY classroom, and others like it, a very rewarding place to teach. And yet, despite the fact that public universities can arguably deliver an education that is superior to any other, we live in a country so indebted to the class rationalization known as “meritocracy,” that we continue to view the Ivy’s as the gold standard. And no amount of admissions scandals (including legacy admissions), alumni that include the likes of Donald Trump and George W. Bush, or social-scientific analysis, seem capable to breaching this belief. It’s part of the American faith.
Which brings me back to the earlier passage I quoted. What I found so off-putting was the imagined audience for the piece. It wasn’t written for me, a graduate of public universities who has spent many years teaching in them, and it wasn’t written for any of my students, at least some of whom have hopefully had a similar experience. We all know what CUNY is. Instead, it was written for the very people it denigrates; it was written for graduates of Harvard.
And this is what bothered me: the article suffers from the kind of inferiority complex that I think is typical of people who weren’t born into the ruling class but who recognize that they’re better than their ruling class audience. It’s a difficult position to hold: to recognize one’s superiority while also recognizing that your society doesn’t see it. But I’d argue that it’s the lot in life for anyone who has been truly educated, so perhaps there are worse fates.
I think there are basically two ways out of this problem: either you realize that your society is wrong, or else, that you are. But this article tries to strike a middle ground; it tries to argue that society is wrong while also pleading to be included in that society. So, on the one hand, it levies a deep criticism of society, but on the other hand, it justifies society’s right to be wrong. Consequently, we don’t really get a radical critique of society that helps us understand the iniquities from which the author suffered, because we instead get a veiled appeal to be included in that society. More simply, it’s not a criticism of the ruling class, it’s an appeal for the ruling class to be more inclusive.
But that’s the kind of toothless criticism about which the ruling class can congratulate itself when it lets a token CUNY graduate join its ranks.