At about this point it began to dawn on me that the inmates were running the institution. I might have known. I had arrived at graduate school in New York City in the late sixties, right at the onset of the Age of Relevance--a time when, as Isaiah Berlin lamented, a whole generation of youth confused crudity with sincerity. What I was encountering now was simply the logical result of that revolution--the supreme relevance of the self in an institution that had ocme to depend for its continuance on the pleasing of that self. It was a self that took its reference not from history, philosophy, and literature but from psychology, a variety conveniently adjusted to the pursuit of personal happiness.
Her own essay must have come as quite a shock to her current students, if they had any willingness to criticize her work, in revealing her own irony in demonstrating her complete capitulation to herself and her desperate needs to be appreciated and respected. For she has built her writing career on travel reporting, an area supremely devoid of history, philosophy and literature while feigning that it includes snippets of same. But that is just my sensibilities being assaulted.
It is in her disdain for the pursuit of personal happiness that she really pisses me off. She, like so many others in academia, seem to think, that even though the students(yes and parents) pay huge sums to contractually fulfill a receipt of product and services, the students somehow owe they institution some submissive acknowledgement that the institution and its elites are know better than they do what is important in life. I can categorically say that they(the students) do not.
Perhaps the simplest way to address this issue is to realize that the inherent fallacy in the system is the claim made that universities and colleges represent "higher" education. 'Higher' is a hierarchical construct, forcing dominance and submission, rigidly or not, upon anyone who is labeled, or feels that they have been so labelled, or the person that does the labelling. It provides an immediate validation of the "i am better than x,y,z and/or you" statements that speak solely of personal power and not of generating human compassion and happiness. The 'higher' is used to refer to a body of knowledge that enables the person what obtains it to aspire to and acquire economic status and capital wealth. Thus those that serve in those institutions are charged with the responsibility of providing the information that allocates the hierarchical resources of the culture, of the system--knowing this equals this status equals this expected economic benefit and so forth. I have already shown that economic and social power are not providers of happiness, indeed they are clearly detrimental to the right to pursue of happiness by the people. It is in fact the universities and colleges that are coded by language and metaphoric constructs to symbolize and sustain the political and economic oppression of those that are not to be allowed to pursue personal happiness. The block quote above merely reiterates this same message in tones that are superior, classist, and elitist; the author just sounds like a bitch.
