Yesterday when I read that Claudine Gay submitted her resignation, my heart hurt for her. I know her downfall comes from republican critics of DEI, from pro-Israeli’s and from conservatives who found plagiarism in her doctoral thesis and journal articles, which I will address in bits and pieces as I process this bludgeoning, but today’s post is mainly just a celebration of higher education in general. As much as her critics want us to believe that they mounted their fight out of concern for education, none of this production would have been possible had it not been for an underlying foundation of conservative derision for higher education.
My boyfriend and I were broken up in 2022, and in November of that year, I was flirting with the guy who replaced my furnace. We got to texting and it turns out we are not on the same page politically so that was regrettable. He said something that I’ve heard people say before that I find wild, that higher education brainwashes people. I never know what to say when I hear that line, because university professors come from elementary and high school just like the rest of us. If people can think about their experience in high school, and then imagine it to be a little harder, it’s like that, although you get to be a little more independent.
I’m so grateful that university wasn’t spoiled for me before I went because it turned out to become one of the greatest loves of my life. I came from a conservative, religious household, and if someone had turned me off from higher ed, I don’t know where I would be today, and I definitely don’t mean that job-wise (considering the job I have). I often think I would be in jail, homeless, or dead had I not received the education and spiritual formation that I did. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have had my Oz moment, where it was as if a little Toto pulled back the curtain on the Oz-god and showed me the levers that government pulls to make it work (and not work). Some divine being saw me and my boiling anger, frustration, and self-hatred as a teenager and had compassion on me and gave me a stepping stool to look out over the various forces acting on my little sheltered life, broadened my perspective, helped me explore other ontologies, and give me a sense of agency. As cynical as I am, I’m baffled why conservatives would want to deny kids that life-giving education. If someone wanted to talk to a “brainwashed” person, I guess they could talk to me because I grew up in the church. Not that brainwashing happens in church in the sense that there are swirls on a screen and everyone repeats phrases coming from the pulpit. It’s not like you don’t have control over your executive functions, but it is a very conscious and determined harnessing of a cultural agreement that a collective psychological projection should be cast on a straight male deity who needs men to have more power than women, who wants us to have sex with the opposite sex, and who wants us to be good or he will punish us in a lake made out of fire. Church deliberately aims to be persuasive, and to win arguments against unbelievers. Is that “brainwashing”? Maybe, depending on what the formal definition is. There are a lot of attempts at persuasion, both from the pulpit, and as outreach from the church, so I’d have to rate it as more “brainwashy” than university. I have two undergrad degrees and I don’t believe that I ever once learned how to debate with conservatives or people without a higher education, nor did it ever occur to me that it would ever be a possibility, which is why I struggle with how to answer people who say higher education brainwashes people because it’s just not true. Your brain doesn’t start becoming more susceptible to broadening the civil liberty franchise just because you’re attending a class in a fancy building that you paid $1,000 for, nor is extending the franchise mental weakness. If it is, I would ask conservatives to demonstrate the catastrophe of education that they fear through neuroscience. But of course, there is no neuroscience to back up anti-intellectualism, it is simply a legacy of American conservatives politicizing education for votes.
I talked to my boyfriend about this, and he says that university has actually always been accused of “liberalizing” minds, since the days that the first universities existed thousands of years ago. In North America, the modern version of the cynicism toward education we know today started around the 1950’s and 60’s when evangelical Christians started to participate in national party politics. One of the prompts to their participation was being confronted with the science that was being taught in secular universities. For example, science that had uncovered some new insights about human nature through the fields of Psychology and Biology challenged conservative Christians’ understanding of human’s place in the cosmos. In response, they started up their own institutes where they could teach their own version of human nature.
In his book, Psychology and Christianity, Dr. Eric Johnson goes back to the early days of the 20th century to demonstrate how Christian institutes started popping up:
“In contrast to Catholics and liberal Protestants, there is not much evidence that conservative Protestants thought much about Psychology in the early twentieth century. Just as psychology was gradually becoming a part of the core curriculum in the social sciences at the major colleges and universities, an examination of course catalogues of Christian liberal arts colleges from the 1920s and 1930s (eg. Wheaton and Calvin) shows that they also began offering courses in modern psychology around that time.
“… However, conservatives were generally moving away from intellectual engagement with the wider culture, which they saw as spiritually blind. This was the heyday of fundamentalism and fundamentalists, by and large, were not interested in cultural issues, higher learning and scholarship…. They tended to be practice-oriented, if not anti-intellectual, more interested in soul-winning and missions than in claiming culture for Christ. They were, for the most part, separationists, desiring to avoid contamination by the world (including the world of ungodly thinking, eg. at the universities). For many fundamentalists, learning the Bible was seen as the primary goal of higher education (rather than learning about things like psychology). As a result, during this time, they began forming their own post-secondary educational institutions: Bible colleges.
“It really wasn’t until after World War II that conservative Protestants began to move out of their cultural ghettos and think more seriously about how their faith bears on the sciences and the arts. A group of fundamentalists began to articulate a more activist role in culture and higher learning, calling themselves evangelicals. It was only in the 1950s that we find evangelicals beginning to engage psychology in any concerted way.”
Johnson, Eric L., Psychology and Christianity: Five Views, pg. 29.
Subsequently under President Nixon, a new brand of cynical and corrupt politics emerged. Nixon courted evangelicals by appealing to their discomfort with secular cultural values, thus paving the way for conservative, Christian lobbying and conservative think tanks that depend on the evangelical vote.
“Richard Nixon brought evangelicals into the Republican Party by focusing his campaigns on cultural issues and by using Billy Graham as a liaison to conservative Protestants. The growth of the heavily evangelical suburban Sunbelt increased evangelicals’ political power and induced the Nixon administration to make a special appeal for their vote. Nixon used White House church services, evangelical events, and interference in the internal politics of the Southern Baptist Convention to win the support of conservative Protestants. The tactics worked. Evangelicals who opposed cultural liberalism and secularism were heartened by Nixon’s culturally conservative rhetoric and his public friendship with Graham, and they gave him stronger support than they had given to any previous Republican presidential candidate. Although Watergate diminished evangelicals’ regard for Nixon, the Republican evangelical coalition that Nixon had helped to create remained politically influential.”
Williams, Daniel K. Nixon’s Evangelical Strategy
The Koch brothers grew out of the conservative think tank movement aimed at disparaging liberals. To this day, they continue to organize to undermine healthy education in the United States, and to cut off their funding. Today, Dr. Jordan Peterson plays into the cynicism of higher education, influencing his followers to turn their noses up at university wholesale.
I’m reading this book called Why Choose the Liberal Arts, and the author keeps going back to the distinction between education as a means for wealth vs education as an end in itself. University years are a special period in a young person’s life to engage intellectually with ancient and modern ideas and see where the sparks lead.
Rightly understood… a liberal arts education is more than a means to an end; it is a dose of otium (leisure) in a world driven by speed and utility. To devote one’s time to exploring the great question is not to negotiate the automatic rungs of the ladder of success, but to step out, pause, and deliberate. The origin of the word “school” or Latin “scola” derives from the Greek term for leisure (schole). … Through the leisure of contemplation we abandon the contingent and engage the eternal; we conceive of ourselves as more than merely material beings. Such joy does not, and need not, serve a purpose beyond itself.”
Roche, Why Choose the Liberal Arts? pg. 26.
Astrologically, university is ruled by Jupiter, and Jupiter, the planet of joy, luck, and expansion, is a part of everyone’s charts- in his healthy state, he represents higher education, wisdom, law, broad-minded thinking, philosophy, international travel, and other languages. The house that Jupiter rules, the 9th house, takes up exactly 1/12th of the chart of every single person living on planet earth, he is that important to everyone. So it’s not like this is a war of haves and have nots in an essentialist or biological sense.
I have four planets in the 9th house, and one of my greatest passions is higher education. I want the kids of today to have the same easy access to a healthy higher education that my generation enjoyed.