Links
Archives
Monday, March 28, 2005
|
THE UNIVERSITY AS WELLNESS CLINIC UD discovers an intriguing convergence in a couple of recent online essays, one about private versus public universities, and the other about health, sickness, and ‘wellness’ in contemporary American and European culture. As with a Gregg Easterbrook piece UD cited awhile back [see UD, 9/11/04], John V. Lombardi notes the absence of any differences in outcome between graduating from a reasonably priced good public university and a very expensive good private one: Many studies have attempted to identify a major difference in the outcomes from attending expensive private institutions or attending high quality public universities in-state at half the price. Few of these find any significant difference in the outcomes, and in most cases the differences that do exist usually appear to reflect the differences in the wealth and opportunity provided by the students’ family circumstances before they enter college rather than any particular enhancement that comes from the luxury process of education. What really matters, writes Lombardi, is “the commitment and focus of the student.” After all, “most colleges and universities sell a commodity product, an education that at its core is fundamentally similar between institutions. The amenities may differ - luxury dorms, elaborate student centers, complex and fully equipped recreational facilities - but the chemistry and English classes are pretty much the same.” Easterbrook, in an interview about university education and successful people [see UD, 9/11/04], puts it this way: It's education generally — not any specific college — that [produced success] for them. The boomers misanalyze the situation and think, Oh, such-and-such person must have gone to Harvard to get where he is. But the relevant fact isn't that he went to Harvard, but that he got a good education somewhere. And a good education is now available at a hundred, maybe two hundred colleges in the United States. This being the case, observers have tried to figure out why tons of people still desperately want their children to go to very expensive private colleges. In some cases, undeniably, there are good intellectual reasons for such a choice. But in a significant number of cases, as Easterbrook suggests, it’s about snobbery. “In the world of Mercedes, Louis Vuitton, and vacation properties, high price means high status. At least some portion of affluent parents would be disappointed if college prices fell; they want the schools they patronize overpriced and thus exclusionary.” James B. Twitchell agrees, and goes further: [T]he cost of tuition has become unimportant in the Ivy League. Like grade inflation, it’s uncontrollable - and hardly anyone in Higher Ed, Inc. really cares. As with other luxury providers, the higher the advertised price, the longer the line. …[Furthermore], among elite schools, the more the consumer pays for formal education (or at least is charged), the less of it he or she gets. The mandated class time necessary to qualify for a degree is often less at Stanford than at State U. As a general rule, the better the school, the shorter the week. At many good schools, the weekend starts on Thursday. .. Hardly anyone in Higher Ed, Inc. cares about what is taught, because that is not our charge. We are not in the business of transmitting what E.D. Hirsch would call cultural literacy… . We’re in the business of creating a total environment, delivering an experience, gaining satisfied customers, and applying the ‘smart’ stamp when they head for the exits. The classroom reflects this. Our real business is being transacted elsewhere on campus. This idea of the “total environment” university, where what’s at stake isn’t education so much as the creation of (as Lombardi’s list of goodies up there suggests) gyms, dorms, and student centers that generate a sense of privilege, exclusivity, and well-being, leads me to the other recent essay I’d like to look at. This one’s by Frank Furedi, who notices that, as Goethe predicted ("Speaking for myself, I, too, believe that humanity will win in the long run; I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else‘s humane nurse."), wealthy countries are becoming hospitals. The “problems we encounter in everyday life are reinterpreted as medical ones,” Furedi writes; “Problems that might traditionally have been defined as existential - that is, the problems of existence - have a medical label attached to them.” A writer for the New York Times, contributing to an end-of-year discussion about American culture in December of 2003, gives an example [see UD, 1/8/04]: These days you would think that there is no such thing as normal, thanks to the hand-in-glove working of the drug and insurance companies with the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the handbook of 374 ‘mental illnesses.’ If you are still grieving a loved one's death two months later, you fit the category of "major depressive disorder." Insurance companies want you quickly fixed, drug companies have a pill for every occasion, and friends and family are too overworked to provide the irreplaceable support for grief that is present in other countries. We are damaging the nature of friendship, teaching people that they need experts to treat them for everything. Furedi argues that we’ve now begun to fetishize the condition of being unwell. Being unwell has become our default position, which means that the attainment of “wellness” becomes “something you have to work on, something to aspire to and achieve. This reinforces the presupposition that not being well - or being ill - is the normal state. That is what our culture says to us now: you are not okay, you are not fine; you are potentially ill. The message seems to be that if you do not subscribe to this project of keeping well, you will revert to being ill.” (This idea of a perpetual project is particularly attractive to hyperactive Americans, since it provides a model within which our restless energies toward self-improvement may be - must be - tirelessly indulged.) Some of these ideas are not really new, but find a pedigree in Freud’s notion that we’re all neurotics; they also bear a family resemblance to the Laingian bromide that we live in a sick society. What’s new, says Furedi, is that “we are consciously valuing illness.” We must be ill, for if we are not ill we do not learn: “It’s almost like going to university, something positive, to be embraced, with hundreds of books telling us how to make the most of the experience of sickness.” Looked at from this perspective, it’s no wonder that our university professors are melancholics (see UD, 1/18/04); they bear the burden, year after year, of conveying insight into the truth of human life through the relentless focus upon and embodiment of being ill, being un-well. But more broadly, UD would like to suggest, in a culture where the “normalisation of illness remains culturally affirmed,” and in which “we are encouraged continually to worry about our health,” one value of the very expensive private university might lie in its simultaneous indulgence of its students’ unwellness and its constant search for a cure. Unlike big public universities (Michigan, Minnesota, Maryland, Wisconsin) where there are too many people about for much personal attention, expensive private colleges are good at creating a hothouse environment for neurotic wellness-strivers. They are good at maintaining the narrative that the parents of neurotic wellness-strivers may have been telling their children about themselves for years: the foundation of their unwellness is that they are brilliant, special, gifted. The years of therapy many over-parented students have enjoyed have conveyed to them above all their specialness, a specialness based upon superior sensitivity, intellect, and creativity. In his spectacular AIDS diary, Unbecoming, the American anthropology professor Eric Michaels remembers his gifted and talented boyhood: I had spent rather a lot of time in testing and therapy sessions by the time I was a college sophomore. These sessions introduced me to a bewildering universe of praise and blame, obligation and independence which seemed quite impossible to me. What was being reinforced was an extreme and alienating sense of my personal uniqueness, the vast gulfs that separated me from any other humankind. Thus, my encounter with culturalogical explanation was a revelation, a discovery embraced longingly. Michaels escaped a disabling sense of his unique unwellness through the discovery of anthropological method; but for many of the students in expensive private colleges, UD wants to suggest, the expense of the experience is justified by the college’s implicit agreement to continue the personal uniqueness story, to indulge the brilliant unwellness of each of its special charges. The institutional philosophy for which parents are willing to pay dearly, then, rests upon an acknowledgment of their children’s neurotic exceptionality, an acknowledgment of the fragility of their mental and physical health, and an in loco parentis devotion to the wellness project of each one of them. |