[iDC] (no subject)

[Luis Camnitzer]

Seeing that in this discussion (Kanarinka, etc.) many are just entering the
academic tunnel, I would like to contribute a little from the vantage point
of the exit. I retired 7 years ago after slowly dying during 32 years in an
institution that started well. We were to take off were we thought Antioch
had stopped, "break the lockstep of traditional education" as our mission
stated in 1968. The three decades plus spent on observing changes of
mission, corruption, brown nosing and decay, only served to teach me that
there is no way to build a truly progressive institution in the U.S. The
rhetoric may be progressive, but the core won't ever get there, and it is
not only due to corporations, government, bad administration and
self-serving colleagues. Education in this country is only a relatively true
right for the people until high-school level. After that it is a commodity
in a profit making business. University profit comes of course from the
tuition students have to pay for the honor of getting a job to help
corporations make more profit. It comes from corporations themselves, that
sponsor projects that benefit them (government and army being part of that),
and it comes from non educational things like sports events. It is into this
picture we enter trying to educate people, without realizing that we can't
really balance a greed-based structure with our idealism.  In terms of art
education I figured that if I had 5000 students over the years, maybe 20 of
them managed to support a family with their art. The 5000 ensured that I
could survive as a professor. The other 4980 that didn't make it in the
gallery circuit, hoped to survive teaching the same way I did. If they
managed to get a teaching job, each one of them would need another 5000
students to survive. We have a perfect pyramid scam here.

I suggest a different utopia than the attempt to find the precarious balance
you are seeking or an impossible institutional reform within the university.
It is too late for all that. It might be much more realistic to accept that
the U.S. universities are corporate tools that in fact are competing with
corporate training at a disadvantage. In art, the Whitney museum is training
its own artists and being better at it than many schools (partly due to
better filtering). Let us stop the hypocrisy and have corporations openly
take over education for "real life," making sure that students survive in
the market. It will provide a much better and up to date education. With
this we would have a true education for serving. Let us also have the
government start from scratch and create a free humanist education system
that ensures that people learn about cultures and ideas, how to speculate
and how to make connections. This would be the education for thinking. The
student could be in both systems at the same time and end up well rounded.
Some of us are better at teaching skills than thinking, and therefore would
contribute in the first system. Some of us are better at idealistic
speculation and would be in the second. We all would lead much less
frustrating lives, be incredibly more productive, and present ourselves with
a constructive attitude to our students. Presently, those of us who are
idealistic can only teach (justified) resentment. Luis Camnitzer
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