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Title: Arrival Survival Author: Pittsburgh Autonomous Student Network Date: 2015 Language: en Topics: Student Power, student movement, disorientation, school Source: Retrieved from FillerPunx.tumblr.com
Welcome to Pitt! 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 soon enough, you’ll watch the excitement fade.
The task of orientation is to clue you in on what’s ahead, to provide a
glimpse into the new social terrain.
Pitt is the rich suburban kid’s first real glimpse of something
resembling diversity. Pitt is the working class kid’s first five-figure
loan. Pitt is Chancellor Gallagher, decked out in the best suits money
can buy, threading his way through the lines of underpaid janitors,
cooks and security guards rallying outside his office for a better
contract and a living wage. Pitt is a private police force harassing
people of color on Forbes, or taking pictures of student protestors to
build files on troublemakers. Pitt is breaking your roommate’s friend’s
brand-name bong underneath the Schenley Bridge. Pitt is the ongoing
gentrification of North Oakland and outright colonization of South
Oakland.
Pitt just raised tuition again this year.
Aging high school rebels now rail lines of crushed-up Adderall in
library bathrooms. Teenaged football stars now stagger from the frat
party to the Econ recitation. Entire semesters spent studying the latest
scientific forecasts of the coming century’s mass extinctions, ocean
acidification and sea level rise of five to fifteen feet are consumed
with the same glazed eyes found scattered across a college algebra
seminar. Lectures on the tipping points recently crossed, on the massive
population displacements and inevitable global destabilization, elicit
raised eyebrows but nothing more. After all, tomorrow is Thirsty
Thursday and my geology lab was due yesterday.
As the illusion of social peace crumbles with this year’s uprisings in
Ferguson, Baltimore, Seattle and the Bay Area, Pitt invites you to spend
your free time drinking in sweaty basements, to join the iPhone
Generation and the growing army of debt-ridden interns. After all, you
are some of the smartest people they could find and you’re needed on the
team – the Clinton team, the Trump team, the IBM team – pick it, there’s
a slot for you somewhere.
All this and more is yours for just four easy payments of $28,000!
Welcome to Pitt.
I guess you could say that we – the small group of your new classmates
who wrote this nonsense – are a little jaded. Of course it’s not all
bad; Pittsburgh is a pretty awesome city. But we can’t help but to feel
there is something missing from Pitt’s campus culture. It is an absence
that speaks to those vague, fleeting thoughts so many students drag from
the classroom to the library. Sure, it’s easy to drown out the doubts
leftover from those first college applications with weekend binges and
house shows, but perhaps it was the entire high school experience that
left us suspicious to begin with. There is a rational angst that we
struggle to articulate: the absurdity of what we accept as “normal”
today.
We browse shopping malls for aesthetics and attitudes, and then fiddle
with social media and smartphones until they fit just right. We namedrop
brands and artists as if they count as our own expression, and then we
scoff at the banality of our parties and scenes as if we play no part in
their creation. Our perceptions of both the successful career and our
own imaginations have been swept away by notions more lavish and distant
than Aldous Huxley could write about. Apathy is hip.
But how can we students even think to blame ourselves? Youth today look
toward a future deflated by ecological and economic collapse; a future
where opportunity is postponed in light of the immediacy of debt,
stagnating wages, and corporate oligarchy. A future where the promise of
sustainability is found exclusively on billboards advertising “clean”
coal, “green” skyscrapers, or hope, change, and vote; a future where
even the most optimistic visions of climate change include mass
migrations, displacements, and extinctions.
The point is we do not choose to be apathetic. Rather, apathy has been
institutionalized, integrated into the relationships we have with
education, work and culture. Education does not cater to our personal
needs and desires, but is instead intended to prepare us for
participation in the market.
The logic of the market is also now the logic of the classroom. Students
are customers, paying for-profit businesses to consume “products” in the
form of marketable career paths. After all, you need to go to college to
land a good job. Our understanding of what it means to be a student is
confined to a sort of profit-driven pragmatism, where the pursuit of
knowledge ultimately becomes a race to the ever-shrinking job market.
This race places us in direct competition with other students to
determine who will have access to the most resources upon graduating.
But so many people are enrolling in school that the job market is
oversaturated with college degrees, and by the time some students
finally have enough credentials to follow their dreams they’re pushing
30 and working just to pay back loans.
And so we approach education with the same tired indifference we
dedicate to the part-time jobs that prevent us from sleeping in on
weekends.
The atmosphere inside today’s classroom is disorienting. Feedback comes
in the form of customer satisfaction surveys. The curriculum is set
before the teacher even meets their students. Discussions of real world
events never extend beyond the speculative bubble of academia, where
debate is applauded so long as it neglects social immediacy; systemic
racism is discussed without reference to the intersection being shut
down by protestors right outside the classroom window.
And just what are students here for anyway? You would think the $1.2
trillion in student loans, a figure that inversely correlates with state
funding cuts, would at least give college graduates some sort of edge in
the race to the job market, but reality is as sobering as the bills.
Over 40 million students will be graduating in a worse financial
situation than any generation in American history. Nearly the entire
prospective labor force is already faced with a lower standard of living
than that of their parents.
But work hard, play hard, amirite?
There’s potential for so much more than this. The curtain is lifting on
the same scene at universities all over this country. Whether it’s
Berkeley, or Madison, or NYU, students have discovered that the only way
to learn anything is to reclaim our passion, and the only way to make
life truly exciting is to fight back.
How you fight is entirely up to you. We painted the situation with a
broad brush, but students aren’t so monolithic. Our generation is bigger
and more diverse than the Baby Boomers, and we all have different
interests, needs, desires… maybe you want to throw parties where sexist
assholes are kicked out, maybe you want to use your parents’ money to
buy weed to share with your classmates who can’t afford it, maybe you
want to “redecorate” the walls and alleyways of Oakland, maybe you want
to join a student group that vibes with what you feel, maybe you want to
kick our asses for writing this bullshit. The point is nothing’s going
to change unless you act in your own interests, here and now.
Let’s fuck shit up this year.
[Adapted from “The Task Ahead of Us” – Filler #3 – Pittsburgh 2015,
Communiqué from an Absent Future – Research and Destroy – California,
2009, Welcome to NYU – New York, 1968]