I remember being a wide-eyed, newly
minted high school graduate. Like
anybody else, I felt that my first year at college would be utterly
transformative, with my voice being fostered by what Brett C. Stockdill and Mary
Yu Danico term in their essay “The Ivory Tower Paradox”, the dissident
tradition. Now, I’m not saying that
college didn’t change me—it did in many deep ways—it’s just that the dissident
culture seems, for the most part, woefully deficient in Davis culture. Especially after the pepper spray incident
last year, I expected the political climate at Davis to be incredibly charged
with students who are fed up with the system and ready to fight it every step
of the way. Clearly, it’s not. But where did this fog of apathy come
from? According to Danico and
Stockdill, the choking of the dissident culture stems from universities being
part of a colonial world governed by white, heterosexual men. I agree.
But these symptoms don’t stand by themselves; these are the symptoms of
the very insidious societal illness of capitalism. In the laissez-faire system that this culture glorifies, selling
oneself is not a question of if it will happen, but rather a question of
when. Through the lens of
capitalism, the pieces fall in place, from the apolitical atmosphere of Davis,
to the threatened cuts to ethnic studies departments.
But one may ask, why does
capitalism, the system we’ve been taught to love, contribute to the stifling of
dissident culture? Take it in the
student’s point of view. Increasingly,
students are told that going to a university can make them stand out to future
employers. Especially with the job
market getting more and more competitive and rising tuition costs, students are
encouraged to maintain stellar grades and not to “waste time” being politically
active. With the over-competitive job
market also comes the risk of pissing of ones future employer. I, for one, have been warned against being
“too political”, because being too political may count against me in the future. We shouldn’t be surprised to see dissident
tradition stifled in our culture where life is merely one long auction where we
sell ourselves.
Similarly,
we shouldn’t be surprised at the cutbacks in ethnic studies departments,
because capitalism works against these academic fields in two ways. As Stockdill and Danico stress, universities
are far from immune to the social illness of capitalism in that they act very
much like big businesses. When it comes
to allocating resources, it isn’t surprising that the departments such as
biology and engineering, which are highly profitable departments, are funded at
the expense of fields that are not, such as ethnic studies. Ethnic studies is further discouraged
because it challenges the very power structures that makes capitalism
“work”. In order for capitalism to
work, there must always be a disempowered labor pool—women and minorities, for
example—who are too distracted with the hatred of each other to band together
and take down their shared oppressors.
Ethnic studies delves deeply into the unjust power imbalances upon which
capitalism thrives, shedding light on the fact that every group has been used
as pawns in a system that is fueled on hatred and misery. If people come to this realization, the
impervious-seeming system of capitalism just might come to a flaming end.
I’m a far
cry from my eighteen-year-old high-school graduate self. Now that I’m starting to understand just how
the world really turns, I’m becoming more and more inclined to try to foster
the dissident tradition that this ivory tower has stared out. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s
time that this ivory tower finally crumbles.
-Melody Yee
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