The Era of Obamacation: Fiscal and National Concerns Going Forward

Courtesy of Cracked.  A joke, just in case you didn't know.

Some may accuse me of leaning rightward these days.  I don't agree, mostly because right and left have no permanent, concrete meanings; I just call things issue-by-issue as I see them.  Still, I admit that up until recently, I would have welcomed Obama's plan to subsidizer higher education with open arms.  Education, so I thought, was one of the great equalizing forces in an unequal world, as well as increasingly necessary in an era where blue-collar manufacturing jobs are no longer available.  Having gone through college, experienced what I've experienced, and heard some very troubling things about these institutions becoming hostile to free speech and due-process, I will say I still welcome Obama's plan, but now my open arms are replaced by heavy reservations.

The Tax Pit

Addressing the situation first from a strictly economic perspective, I support the government making investments that it can get back.  On the more technical side of things, that might very well make financed education useful, but then there is the Liberal Arts field.  Admitting not to having done research into statistics about it, but plenty of job searching, I can offer myself as a living embodiment of what is merely a running joke for luckier people.  That is; I'm a non-person so far as specialized labor goes.  Not one application I have found asks for my History degree, and no employer to whom I actually applied has cared.  People do not care about my skills; indeed, they may even be repulsed by them.

There are probably multiple reasons for that.  These days, the term "Cultural Marxism" gets a lot of use, and to be sure, that phenomenon does exist on college campuses, perhaps most poignantly, in my experience, at UCSD's Groundworks Books; positively packed with Marxism-related books--though some took a more oppositional stance than the purveyors may have known.  Even so, I wouldn't call the rash of Marxist sentiment universal, and certainly it is not the main issue plaguing the field of Liberal Arts.  That dubious distinction goes to the fact, at least insomuch as I observed it, that almost nothing in Liberal Arts is universal.

For more clarification of that, I offer you the following anecdotes.  In community college, I took a Philosophy course where the teacher heavily pushed a version of Greece's Peloponnesian Wars that painted Socrates as an innocent victim of Pericles, the latter portrayed as the George W. Bush of his time for his enthusiastic war with Sparta.  When I got to the University of California, San Diego, I took a politics course where the teacher gave an account more charitable to Pericles as an idealist ahead of his time, and called out Socrates' anti-war activism as disingenuously motivated by his being an ardent Spartaphile.  After that, I took a history course on the Chinese revolution, wherein the teacher assigned the infamously positive portrayal of Mao Zedong, Edward Snow's Red Star Over China.  The next class I took, picking up after the 1949 Revolution, and taught by a different professor, assigned multiple texts that felt universally hostile to Mao.  Then there was what felt like a general trend in UCSD's History department to portray the rise of Asia as an economic juggernaut as being precipitated by its countries adopting the ways of the Western nations that humiliated them in such things as the Opium Wars.  When I transferred to University of California, Santa Cruz, however, there seemed to be a large desire to portray that attitude as a myth, and argue that China and Japan always had economic potential that would have come out anyway.

Who was right and who was wrong?  While I could speculate on that, and some of my thoughts form the basis of a book I still hope to get published someday, the issue at hand here is that it doesn't matter.  Liberal Arts does not deal in the concrete terms the big money fields want; it deals, so far as I've seen, in the impression that its scholars have a superior understanding of the world, only for them to be disillusioned later.

There may be no more poignant example of this than a statement I got from the History professor with whom I completed my thesis, when I asked what I would be able to do with my degree: "Historians secretly rule the world."  The natural assumption is that he was being facetious, but I associate that term with exaggerations, not outright lies.  He did offer some clarification to what he was exaggerating; he said they're in high demand in such powerful positions as banking because they've learned how to collect sources and write about things, but everything I have experienced since then has given lie to even that seemingly more sensible clarification.  It's true, I can do research and write about things, and those are useful skills to have.  However, to say that having a History degree is in high demand in jobs entailing such skills may well be akin to saying that walking almost everywhere you go will be a big help getting a job as a fitness instructor; it moves you in the direction of usefulness, but simply can't compete with other experience more relevant.  You won't get a job instructing aerobics for walking everywhere in a world where many go into outright athletics with their eduction, and the same is true for writing.  Of all the things I've seen jobs for writing about, from business, to technology, to medicine, there wasn't one where experiences more useful than my own don't exist to fill them.  An employment agency told me outright that History is an almost worthless degree, and that my professor was saying what he did to keep me in my seat and him in his job.  Based on my experience, I trust the employment agency much more.

That wasn't the end of my conversations with them.  I have Asperger's Syndrome, which as they have confirmed, plays a fair (or rather, unfair) amount of its own part in walling many jobs off from me.  Here, though, they also took the conversation back to that one big thing people with these degrees can do; get their teaching credentials as well, and impart their "wisdom" to others.  It turns out, so he said, that this is the main skilled job people with Asperger's go into, essentially because of its freedom; not many people can tell them how to run that ship.  That's amusing, but frankly, it's also scary; especially in light of all else that has happened.  I don't think I have the time or the money to get my teaching credentials, but at this point I seriously question whether I would accept them and a Liberal Arts teaching position even if offered them for free.  I began my college career studying Politics; I switched out when I was told that the only things I could do with that were run for office (for which I'm too blunt, stubborn and ugly-voiced to be elected), or become a lawyer, which violates my moral principles. (Or, again, get the credentials and teach Politics.)  Having taken the new path I did to my current status, I may soon add "Liberal Arts Professor" to that pile of immoral careers alongside "Lawyer".  I wonder how I could resign myself to the selfishness of teaching students a curriculum that built them up only for them to break down, gabbing on and on before them self-importantly while my position was as much a prison as a castle.

If we are going to be paying for education with an unprecedented amount of tax dollars, we owe it to ourselves to look at just how much of a tax pit some of the programs are, and I must say, from where I stand, it's not looking good for Liberal Arts.  The system of tenure in place simultaneously enables professors to shift their standards almost anywhere; even at the expense of each other, and fills up what few jobs might otherwise be available for the many students who studied under those professors.  Either far more relevant jobs somehow become available in the private sector, or this field, its professors, and its students should get a severe reality check.

Liberalism Destroyed By Design

There is another issue plaguing college campuses, and it is scarier than the economic one noted above: The growth of Identity Politics and Political Correctness on college campuses.  These new strands of leftist thought have undermined what used to be seen as the cornerstones of liberalism, such as free speech and equality.  This is no mere trend among young adults; it has been actively promoted by such faculty as Catharine Mackinnon, Bettina Aptheker and Mireille Miller Young as leftism's proper course.  Due process isn't safe either, when it comes to men accused of rape, courtesy of mass hysteria surrounding a rape culture whose existence is greatly exaggerated at best.  Back when I first attended college, I frequently wore a Super Mario Bros shirt with the phrase, "I scored with the princess."  It never got anything but laughs, but these days, I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing got attacked as a "microaggression" against women.  If this upending of traditional liberal democratic society and political smearing of natural sexual desires continues to be stirred up on campus, it is likely to keep bleeding out into the rest of society, too.  This, combined with that infamous strand of Liberal Arts academia, of questionable size but undeniable presence, which encourages people to punch up at the devil they know while neglecting those they don't (ie, hate and blame their own government, country, and culture while absolving others of any wrongdoing), poses a huge threat of undermining the bedrock of free society.  The thought that America could be personally financing such undermining, even more than it already has, should scare people.  It undoubtedly scares conservatives already, but it should also scare any self-identified liberals who understand that "liberal" and "left" are not the same thing, "conservative" is necessarily the opposite of "liberal" only in cases where the traditions being conserved are not liberal, and that "progressive" is subjective.

Invest Wisely

Those concerns remain tantamount, but depending on how people approach this, they can take their studies in a path that will be better for them, and in fact, their society.  I may take issue with feminism frequently, but it has one modern talking point I absolutely share: STEM is very empowering.  I think there are limits as to where it should be pushed, at the expense of girls' actual interests, but pushing it at some place isn't amiss.  Debbie Sterling says only one thing with which I can't quite agree: It's not just women who should be pointed towards the STEM fields, but rather our society as a whole.  Part of me feels like I'm betraying myself, in that I'm very right-brained, and an academic culture where people like me get little support in studying our own interests would be something of a letdown.  Yet I think I'd take it over my actual situation, wherein I stepped, in part was lured, naively into a field that ceased to do me almost any good since I graduated.  I'd gladly pass up being an emotive but intellectually questionable hippie whining about pollution and dwindling resources, for the chance to learn to build solar-powered desalinization plants, even a little bit.

America these days is arguably associated more with its material culture than its democratic ideals, but even taken as a society that prioritizes technology, we aren't ideal.  Too many of us are slaves to technology rather than masters, because too much of what runs our technological society comes from outside it--sometimes from societies that do not share our ideals.  When I first started worrying about the Western world's decline in some ways with regards to its Islamic and Neo-Confucianist ("Communist" is barely appropriate anymore) rivals/trading partners, I also worried that I'd be seen as a xenophobe for airing these worries.  These days, however, things are dire enough that I have no further reservations expressing them.  Apparently, we now live in a world where our filmmakers and cartoonists are threatened for producing what they want on their own soil, thanks to reach of illiberal cultures that can now extend their wrath.  North Korea and the Charlie Hebdo assassins may be labeled as rogues, but they're also connected in tangible ways to nations we fund, and when these rogues pose a threat, we need to jerk the purse strings harder while we still hold them.  Some of the money we send to China for its cheap manufactured goods will end up in North Korea, while some of the money we send to the Middle East for its oil will end up in the hands of Islamic radicals.  I don't claim to know the percent, but now I say that any is too much.  Unconditional trade will keep coming back to bite us; conditions of standing with us instead of their bigoted little neighbors should be leveled at China and the Middle East.  Hence, it ought to be seen as a matter of pride to do all we can to make our infrastructure more and more durable and self-sufficient, so the threat of us severing trade relations with these questionable allies has as much teeth as possible.  The drive to STEM isn't just a feminist concern; it's a national one.

Conclusion

The United States, along with Western society as a whole, stands at a crossroads.  We are preparing our youth to have more access to education than ever, and it must either fall on us to decide what we will and won't fund or teach, or them to decide what they will and won't study or believe.  That will make the difference between our money creating a rash of pseudo-liberal, essentially unskilled deadbeats who suck up tax dollars and undermine the bedrock of liberal democracy, or a bold corps of technocrats who see straight, strengthen our infrastructure both private and nationalized, and give our culture the best chance it has for standing up to its underminers, from within and without, culturally and economically.  Politicians, taxpayers, faculty, and students, we must all contemplate that choice.