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My parents certainly had college dreams for me. After all, they wanted me to move up in life, big time. Where exactly "up" was seemed less than clear to me then. But after a great fight I wanted to go to Cornell (girls!) I lost and, in 1962, ended up just where they wanted me to be, at Yale. Even in those days, it cost a significant pile of dough to go there, a major strain for my parents at the time. (Now, it's more than $75,000 a year!) Still, there was no question about it. It was, after all, simply a part of my destiny as they saw it.
So, there I found myself, on campus in those years with George W. Bush and John Kerry (not that I knew either of them or much of anyone else either), a Jew at Yale just after that school removed its Jewish quotas. Unrushed by fraternities amid all those WASP-y boys from another universe, I felt as if I were waiting for life to begin someday on a distant planet I could barely imagine. Then, in my sophomore year, I walked into a Chinese history class taught by the husband-and-wife duo Arthur and Mary Wright. (She was the first woman given tenure and a professorship at the college!) He covered ancient China; she, the more modern eras; and I was stunned by it all, by worlds I had known nothing about. The next thing I knew I was launched on my future career (not faintly the one my parents had ever imagined) as a historian of China.
Admittedly, swept away during the Vietnam era while in graduate school at Harvard in Chinese history, I never became a Sinologist. Still, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon suggests today, at its best, college had indeed given me "a lifelong curiosity about the world and some tools to help" satisfy it." And I thank my parents for that.
Otherwise, I would say that my school years prepared me in none of the obvious ways for my future life as, first, a printer (and a lousy one at that), then a journalist, next a book editor, and finally the guy who runs TomDispatch. So, I've read Gordon's piece today with amazement, trying to imagine myself 60 years younger and heading into what she describes in a devastating fashion as a modern pyramid scheme of higher education. When you're done, you'll be amazed at just how low "higher education" can really get. Tom
Debt and Disillusionment
How College Is Like the Airplane Game
For the last decade and a half, I've been teaching ethics to undergraduates. Now admittedly, a little late to the party I've started seriously questioning my own ethics. I've begun to wonder just what it means to be a participant, however minor, in the pyramid scheme that higher education has become in the years since I went to college.
Airplane Games
Sometime in the late 1980s, the Airplane Game roared through the San Francisco Bay Area lesbian community. It was a classic pyramid scheme, even if cleverly dressed up in language about women's natural ability to generate abundance, just as we gestate children in our miraculous wombs. If the connection between feminism and airplanes was a little murky well, we could always think of ourselves as modern-day Amelia Earharts. (As long as we didn't think too hard about how she ended up.)
A few women made a lot of money from it enough, in the case of one friend of mine, for a down payment on a house. Inevitably, a lot more of us lost money, even as some like me stood on the sidelines sadly shaking our heads.
There were four tiers on that "airplane": a captain, two co-pilots, four crew, and 8 passengers 15 in all to start. You paid $3,000 to get on at the back of the plane as a passenger, so the first captain (the original scammer), got out with $24,000 $3,000 from each passenger. The co-pilots and crew, who were in on the fix, paid nothing to join. When the first captain "parachuted out," the game split in two, and each co-pilot became the captain of a new plane. They then pressured their four remaining passengers to recruit enough new women to fill each plane, so they could get their payday, and the two new co-pilots could each captain their own planes.
Unless new people continued to get on at the back of each plane, there would be no payday for the earlier passengers, so the pressure to recruit ever more women into the game only grew. The original scammers ran through the game a couple of times, but inevitably the supply of gullible women willing to invest their savings ran out. By the time the game collapsed, hundreds of women had lost significant amounts of money.
No one seemed to know the women who'd brought the game and all those "planes" to the Bay Area, but they had spun a winning story about endless abundance and the glories of women's energy. After the game collapsed, they took off for another women's community with their "earnings," leaving behind a lot of sadder, poorer, and perhaps wiser San Francisco lesbians.
Feasting at the Tenure Trough or Starving in the Ivory Tower?
So, you may be wondering, what could that long-ago scam have to do with my ethical qualms about working as a college instructor? More than you might think.
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