College Saved My Life
Can we stop talking shit about the university?
Can we stop talking shit about the university? Absolutely not, but we can at least add more nuance when we do.
Traffic pools in the usual places like bodies waiting to board toward nowhere. Driving up I-95 I’m making my usual pilgrimage from Dawn, Virginia to Prince George’s County, Maryland. On these drives I prefer a podcast to keep me company. I particularly gravitate toward listening to interviews with creators who have built products I have found valuable at some point in my life. This led me to listen to a random podcast interview1 with the founder of Treehouse, an online platform with coding classes for at-home learning. It’s a platform I’ve long admired so I was disappointed to hear the first full 10 minutes of terribly thin critiques on the role and value of universities. Unfortunately, pitting universities as the scapegoat for the failings of Neoliberalism seems to be a trend in the skills based education space. So much so that it’s largely a part of every company’s marketing copy and it usually sounds something like this, “Instead of going into debt over a piece of paper, come over here to get the skills you need for the job you want”. In fact, I was a lead software engineering instructor at a coding bootcamp who ran an ad depicting universities and libraries as these useless dead zones when they are quite the opposite. This type of flagrant audacity from schools that are essentially start-ups is dangerous. And here is why, coding schools are adopting this “universities are dead” marketing copy with syllabi and curriculum completely devoid of any cultural context or political frameworks through which students can begin to think about the implications of the powerful skills they are learning. I will never be able to fully articulate how profoundly irresponsible this is.
Let’s be honest, we have beef with the university. The amount of debt it locks folks into is predatory, the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy2 embedded in it shows up as nothing short of violence and the ableist and colonial gaslighting of it all has got to go, has got to go, has got to. But it would be irresponsible to not talk about the value it does, in fact, offer. It does provide a space of intellectual rigor and curiosity that inspires you to question the very fabric of reality you’ve been told to wrap yourself in as if it were a story all your own, as if it will keep you warm. The act of questioning a fiction instead of adopting it is an invaluable life-long skill and worthy pursuit. If the leaders of these skills based education platforms looked just outside of the singular goal of creating employees, we might see this quite clearly. Along with the irresponsible trend of tech education spaces using marketing copy to convince marginalized folks to skip university, we are simultaneously seeing a trend of the science community returning to the humanities, collaborating with artists and remembering the transformative craft of storytelling. This is the grand, often unrealized, potential of the university: the generative pursuit of interdisciplinary thought and practice. In 2012, I created my own major piecing together classes from the computer science, women's studies, art, philosophy, theater, and black studies departments, my degree became a quilt. A decade later I was invited inside a biotechnology company based on a pitch to write a non-linear speculative fiction novella where I put abolition in conversation with synthetic biology.
Seeda School is rooted in the soil of this praxis of intellectual rigor and interdisciplinary imagination.
A devotional practice of looking underneath every story ever told.
A practice of tracing my curiosity upstream then following it downstream again, surrendering to wherever it takes me.
A practice learned inside the university.
Friends, we can hold both — the failings of the university and the pleasure of communal study which expands our sense of possibility in all directions. This isn’t only possible inside the university. We explore this inside Seeda School, by asking how might we re-imagine the value of learning how to code beyond career mobility and toward the space of wild possibility when braided into our existing creative ecosystem?
While under a tree older than my great grandparents providing the quiet grace of shade, a spider the size of the bread crumb from my morning pastry is my only companion as I read the words of Magdalena Zurawski’s essay, “Being Human Is an Occult Practice”. Inside she reminds us, “Neoliberalism requires us to limit or suppress much of what is human in us because much of what is human in us serves no economic purpose”. As I read this essay I think about how much Neoliberal policy has paved the way for so much of the software we use on a daily basis, software created by white men celebrated for dropping out of college, never having to question their position in a world they create and dominate. College didn’t teach me how to code, this much is true. But college gave me the politic of black feminism and the practice of interdisciplinary study with others. And it is the politic of black feminism and interdisciplinary study with others that has saved my life.
“Helping People Do Things Better - Learning, Sales, & Doing the Work” with Ryan Carson - Founder & CEO Treehouse. Find My Catalyst Podcast. Apr 24, 2018.
Nuance is hard to find written down online (especially marketing copy...).
Still, the more I talk to people working in the higher ed and edtech, the more I find that most people are thoughtful in their critiques. I might be lucky in who I get to spend time speaking with, but interacting makes me optimistic about the shared understanding here