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Title: Welcome to NYU Author: Anonymous Date: November, 1968 Language: en Topics: student movement, USA, 1968, Black & Red Source: Black & Red Number 3, November, 1968, page 23 Notes: Scanned from original.
This is a copy of a leaflet given to all registering freshmen by the
Orientation Committee at New York University.
Sept. 16, 1968
New York University Orientation Committee Introductory Packet
Welcome to NYU. From the prison of high school, it looked cool and
inviting, full of new freedoms and the chance to learn something real
for the first time. But as you get close to it, you’ll watch it
disappear. The job of orientation is to let you in on what’s ahead, what
will start when the sun rises on the first day of classes.
NYU is President Hester, dressed in the best suits that money can buy,
threading his way through the bums in Washington Square Park on the way
back to his penthouse. NYU is cops chasing blacks and hippies out of the
park so the rich people can get to sleep. NYU is the president mourning
the death of Martin Luther King while sitting on the board of a
corporation deeply involved in Rhodesia and South Africa. NYU is special
courses on the “science” of increasing consumer sales while Biafra
starves. On the Lower East Side, cops drag furniture out on the street
to evict a family while NYU teaches how to manage real estate holdings
effectively.
Queers cruise on Eighth Street while NYU dormitories “freely” decide
what time the girls have to be in at night. Dropout kids, their minds
spaced out on drugs, sit on the steps along Macdougal Street while NYU
teaches why our leaders know best.
While in every corner of this country a whole society is coming apart
and a new age of social chaos is dawning, NYU invites you to join the
Dodge Rebellion, the Pepsi Generation, and the jet set. After all, you
are some of the smartest people they could find and you’re needed on the
team--the Nixon team, the Humphrey team, the IBM team--pick it, there’s
a slot for you somewhere. Guaranteed high pay and a nice apartment with
24 hour security guards to keep the niggers and anarchists out.
All this awaits you. Insanity rules--join in. Welcome to NYU.
If you’re beginning to think you made the wrong choice, forget it. The
curtain is lifting on the same scene at universities all over this
country. Whether it’s Berkeley, or Madison, or uptown at Columbia,
students have discovered that the only way to learn anything is outside
coursework and the only way to make life bearable is to fight back.
The university has become a training ground for industrial robots. You
came here to get an education--to ask some basic questions about
yourself and your values, and to decide on how to embark on your adult
life. Instead you will be whipped into shape for corporations and
bureaucracies--given the right attitudes, force-fed the relevant
information, and tailored to the slots NYU knows are waiting out there.
Four years from now, you will be paraded like so many pieces of choice
meat before the corporate recruiters or graduate school departments to
be selected for a future in the air-conditioned nightmare. “Here’s one
that mastered advanced calculus at 14, gives a damn about the people in
our ghettoes, goal-oriented, aggressive as hell, and knows that image
counts.” If you don’t like all this, you’re free to join the bums in the
park, but wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick?
Against all this, students are rebelling. They are not asking for more
privileges for themselves--they are trying to fight their way out of a
nightmare.
There was no sudden takeover of American universities. In the earlier
part of this century, the small number of universities that existed
quite obviously served only the upper class. It was a place where young
men sowed their wild oats, learned a little about Plato and nineteenth
century literature, and made the “connections”--marital and
businesswise--that would allow them to continue their proud tradition.
The newly arrived immigrants worked in city sweatshops and struggled to
get their children through grade school, so they could learn to read and
write.
But changes in the economic basis of this country forced the development
of more and more universities and colleges so the manpower to run huge
corporations, staff school systems, design advanced machinery and
develop new technology could be trained. Trained, not educated. As the
high school diploma had become essential for blue collar jobs, the
college diploma became essential for white collar jobs. That did not
mean white collar workers were moving into the ruling class; instead the
universities were expanding to keep the economy expanding: going to
college was your ticket into the working class. Old style
“professionals”--doctors and lawyers--have become new style bureaucratic
functionaries. Huge law firms serving mammoth corporations have turned
careers based on individual enterprise into graduated steps in the
corporate hierarchies. Doctors have their careers defined by their
specialties inside huge impersonal hospital systems.
Education has become a major industry. The government plowed in
tremendous amounts of money--“higher education in 1960 received about
$1.5 billion from the federal government--a hundredfold increase in
twenty years.” (Clark Kerr, Uses of the University.) School teachers
became the largest single job category in the country. An army of
teachers--some three million at present--funnel standardized curricula
into the heads of the children of this country. Standardized information
leads to standardized response--much easier to control the population
that way.
The new industry, the “knowledge industry,” created universities of, by
and for the corporations: “The university and segments of industry are
becoming more and more alike” (Clark Kerr). Everything that could
possibly be researched became part of the university’s role. Biological
warfare, police training, weapons research, riot control, consumer
buying patterns: at Michigan State a Ph. D. was given on “An evaluation
of Thirteen Brands of Football Helmets on the Basis of Certain Impact
Measures.”
On one level, it makes good sense for the universities to be run like
businesses and for businesses. If the job of the university is to train
technological workers, school teachers, corporate types, government
bureaucrats and career diplomats, then it should seek the closest ties
with industry and government. Clark Kerr points out that “the university
is being called upon to...merge its activities with industry as never
before...”; if that is to happen, it makes sense for President Hester to
sit on the boards of corporations and for the Trustees to be chosen for
their connections In industry and government.
But every student should realize that all the ideals of education are
thereby thrown out the window. The training of corporate armies requires
that people specialize as early as possible and define themselves by
their occupation--knowledge is something that is pre-digested and
distributed in the classroom, top down. Scientists must learn not to
question the ends to which their research is put, government servants
must learn the correct response in order to fit in. People at the
universities can protest against the Vietnam war, as long as they don’t
try to stop the training process or end the research: “praise free
speech and pass the ammunition.”
The student rebellion is taking place at the universities because
students realize that the meaninglessness of their college education is
directly linked to the collapse of the whole society. In earlier years,
students went South to protest racism, or to Washington to protest the
war. But now they have come to see that the university administrations
are the willing servants of these policies even as they mouth liberal
values, and that the whole educational process has been warped to meet
those needs.
Endless debates in the universities about freedom of speech and
democratic values serve only to cover over the facts of raw power. The
power to kill Vietnamese with pellet bombs, to keep South African
workers in slavery, to murder black people in the streets of our cities
rests on real control over the uses of the university.
We are face to face with our oppressors right here at NYU. We are told
to choose our own prisons and to treat the artifacts of consumption as
the substance of life. Meanwhile the killing and starvation goes on, as
wise men in quiet offices decide the fate of nations. Their hearts
troubled just the right amount, they smile benignly at us and say, “so
it must be.”
We say no. A change must come and it is being built among us day by day.
Join our struggle.