How Colleges and Universities Continued to Fail Us.
Winter break is here. For the umpteenth time I am writing/discussing my disdain, disappointment disapproval at the American school system, especially at the collegiate level. You might be one of the many students who just finished 15 long grueling weeks of “higher” learning during a global pandemic. You might be one of many who hoped to to cross the stage to accept your degree. If you got your degree mailed-shipped to you, just know that your degree isn’t meaningless because thousands of people didn’t hear your name be called and watched you accept it. Your degree was useless long before receiving it by mail or FEDex’d. That doesn’t take away from the hard work you may have done, especially this year, but no matter the year we as people looking to further our education hoping it’ll pay off in the future are still expected to do things for free, nothing, which is worse than doing something for free or doing this for the hell of it, which isn’t worse than doing something for nothing, but we’re college students/adults with lives and other responsibility’s. WE DON’T HAVE THE TIME NOR DO WE REALLY WANT TO SPEND TIME DOING BULLSHIT BUSY WORK! It should go without saying that I don’t speak for all students. College/University deans and presidents reading this looking to punish students all over something ONE disgruntled pupal said, relax. I have to say that because common sense isn’t something that’s taught at any school.
Professor Sandefer’s Lecture.
In today’s class we will be discussing the ancient African philosophy known today as “common sense.” By discussion I mean I will be doing all or majority of the talking and you will be forced to stay and listen. Yes, this is a lecture, no you may not be excused to tend to your cat. You sleep, I’ll mark you absent. Now that we’ve (I’ve) got that out the way let us start with what common sense is. Common sense is “a good and sound judgement in practical matters.” No, I did not make that definition up, yes it is what Google said, but I’m the professor which means I am in charge and what I say is correct and backed by me with no further evidence needed other than my name behind it. As a professor of common sense I am the authority on what common sense is. I don’t care if I’m teaching a bunch of school deans and presidents. When you’re in my lecture hall named after a slave owner who owned my family, you’re obligated to listen to me and take everything I say as gospel. The students you all exploit and steal from are away not enjoying their winter break as much as they should because they’re trying to recover from corona. Some are doing so figuratively, some literally, some are doing both thanks to the uncommon sense decision making y’all made and other university heads made because you wanted things to be as “normal” as possible, which isn’t possible because we are living in uncertain and extremely different times. “We did the best we could given the circumstances.” Did you really? Is kicking millions of people out of their dorms and still charging them rent (room and board) the best thing you could’ve done given the circumstances? The best thing for your pockets is not always the best thing for humanity. Forcing people to become homeless until you figure out a plan is not how you create a “new normal.” Homelessness will never be the norm for someone who has always had a place to stay nor should it be the norm for those who have been homeless for longer than 12 months, but that’s a lecture for the other course I teach, “How America Sucks, section 1984” By a show of hands, how many of you paid your professors to help students cope with what is going on by allowing them to assign their students “busy work” unrelated to what the course was specifically about to keep their minds off their loved ones who’ve had the rona or those who have died from it? Keep your hand up. With your other hand, slowly place it on your neck and squeeze as hard as possible. With your hand that is in the air, quickly hold your nostrils shut making it as hard to breathe as possible. Do this until you pass out and you better wake your punkass up because sleeping in my class is prohibited. Now that your punkass is up again, how dare you? What gives you the authority to decide a coping mechanism for those people? As a student who hated every week of my first corona-semester I can tell you “more work” is not what I asked for nor did it help me get through tough times. I know the goal is to create busy bee’s who just spend their days working because bee’s don’t take a break even when broken, they’re still moving. That’s not admirable, that’s miserable. When we’re broken we should not keep moving. We should be taking the time to heal. That’s common sense. More work means more stress. More stress means more deaths which means less workers doing the work. I’m teaching you this valuable info for free because I never want another student I never want another student to be involuntary placed in a position to do work for an organization too cheap to pay staff/researchers to find what they’re looking for. This is the part of the lecture where I share a boring yet relative story to the class. You sleep, you fail. This past semester, one of my professors thought it was a good idea to sign up the class to be slaves, I mean, unpaid and unsolicited researchers for this organization looking for stats on breast feeding. This was not an anatomy class, nor biology nor gender studies, but here we were, assigned 6 weeks out of the 8 week course to research extensively and report to this cheap ass organization at the end of every week. The class itself, aside from the forced labor was a class where we had to write about two multiple paged papers per week and did a lot of reading. All of this time consuming work was expected of us because we’re o lockdown and professors assume being locked in doors all day means you have all the time in the world. “Give em something to do.” “Give them a sense of purpose during this time since they are out of work, just don’t actually pay them for that work. That’ll make everything alright.” The gall is maddening. Exploiting FOR NOTHING labor from college students doesn’t cease to exist because you send passive aggressive emails detailing how important it is for students to do the work because you feel strongly about breast feeding and breast feeding research. Class, I never thought in my 29 years of living in the hell of the universe did I think “You know what? Fuck them titties, I’ll pass.” I’m not against breast feeding, I’m against slavery. I’m against forced labor and exploitation. So I opt’d out of doing the research for this organization, but continued to do the course work for the class that had nothing to do with the XN Project. I failed the class with a D+, yes that is failing to me. If I had the chance to do it again I would’ve just dropped the class altogether. Still, points were made and I’m the crazy mothafucka who would cut his own arm off to make a point and build a brand new mechanical arm that’ll do do things better than my right arm could ever do. The lesson in this story is to not do what I do because I’m crazy, but also stop driving people crazy. The next organization to come to your college/university asking for you to offload a few slaves for a few weeks/months, scream “FUCK YOU, PAY THEM!” If you’re the one reaching out to those organizations with the promise of free/for nothing labor, do the hand thing I told you to do earlier.
