Troves of the Academe

Owin' Pain turns a caustic eye on the Youniversity, and I am reminded of an episode from my own stewdunt daze. There was a time, mes grands, when your humble blurgher considered the professoriat as a career, although he would never have used such vulgar terminology to describe the calling. He imagined a tweedy and buccolic future teaching Delmore Schwartz and occasionally fondling an undergraduate or four. He figured it wouldn't be so hard to land a sinecure at some joint like his own alma mater, and after a brief interregnum of tawdry tenure-seeking, he would live the rest of a resplendent, academikal life as the Most Popular Gay Professor of Literature on Campus.

Midway through my junior year, I was accused of violating the school's honor code. Now I was at this point severly booze- and dope-addled and only hazily aware that the school even had such a prissy little document, so when I first learned of the, ahem, charges, I momentarily considered the possibility that I had, somehow, inadvertantly, violated some obscure codicil of the Farber College Charter, but soon the details emerged: I had cheated? On a group project? In a one-credit rocks-for-jocks geology class I was taking pass-fail to complete the gen ed requirements? Anyway, it turned out I had been accused by a fellow campus invert whose boyfriend I may or may not have fucked in the ass in a private study carrel in the library the semester prior, and it turned out that said fag was also the president of the honor code committee, a gang of hopped-up Pharisees who administered the honor codex like a campus-confined brigade of youth Sonderkommanden, doling out disciplinary sentences from community service up through suspensions and expulsions.

Being a brat and a spoiled one, and also legitimately objecting to the crazy idea that my own accuser would preside over my hearing, I moved swiftly to circumvent the whole procès. I wasn't some fin-aid, scholarship loser they could push around. Mommy and Daddy paid good money for me to be there! Thus did I find myself in the office of the President of the College, who frustrated me for about fifteen minutes with several lines of bullshit about student governance, self-determination, life lessons, truth, justice, the pursuit of knowledge, learning, ethical conduct, and cet'ra, until at last I summoned up a phrase I'd dreamed up while jacking off in the shower that very morning, one that has subsequently served me splendidly and often in my, ahem, career: "What is it," I inquired, drawing my scrawny chest up to its fullest, beaked position, "about the fundamentally transactional nature of our relationship that you don't understand?"

Silence! Being less keen on the face and body language of adults then than I later became, I though the look of stumped constipation on her face meant that I was in big trouble, mister. And then . . . she murmered something about looking into it, thanked me for my time, and I never again heard a thing about the honor code.

Now, I mention this distant episode only as anecdotal evidence of this basic truth: the vague professorial line about the intrinsic value of higher education is pure pretention. Universities aren't in dager of becoming degree factories any more than I am in danger of becoming Homo sapiens; one doesn't become that which one already is. The relationship between student and educator is transactional. You pay money and receive a credential in return, from which you derive future privileges. The university model isn't really all that different from the parking validation. The various hoary stories about how thinks wunts wur, in which the idyllic old academy was a sepia-toned Alexandria, one half Plato and the other half a manic Robin Williams yawping from atop a prep-school desk, are invariably fake. Anyone who reads Mary McCarthy knows that today's "Humanities" profs are identical to their grousing generational predecessors. Meanwhile do you imagine that when that old Nazi Bootlegger, Prescott Bush, was getting pissed on and buttfucked by his fellow Skulls and Boners, Yale was any more or less a for-pay enforcer of class standards?