The recent Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has generated activism and passion in many students and recent college graduates. I, too, confess to a momentary desire to join the angry “99” chants of my fellow youth, but perhaps it’s time to pause and take a step back to think about why we’re so taken with the idea of OWS. That is, “we,” the privileged students of a top university. After some thought, it seems clear, to me at least, that our participation in such a “sweeping” movement may have less to do with a sense of social justice and more with frustration at a lack of professional achievement.
It seems we students are protesting for ourselves, for a collective disappointment at the lack of return on our educational investments: the haunting anxiety over the trade-off of staying true to aspirations versus finding a well-paying job and moving out of our parents’ houses. I think elite graduates and students are riding on the revolutionary coattails of people with real problems in order to express outrage at the fact that a $200,000 education makes no more guarantees of success than a community college degree. It seems unfair that previous generations didn’t have this problem, and we’re determined to howl it out despite being fully aware that such a comparison is a foolish and irrelevant exercise.
There’s also a much deeper reason why many young people are so upset. It’s because we stared at the world upon emerging from ivory tower universities of intellectual greatness and saw that many of us, the supposed great thinkers of our generation, the crème de la crème, are actually only mediocre.
Ever since grade school, the “talented and gifted” have been singled out and encouraged by teachers more than others. Good students were usually given a free pass because they’d somehow received a reputation for being smart kids—so many of us were allowed to skate by, accruing full praise for half-hearted efforts. I’m especially guilty of it. Instead of developing practical skills, we were coached to be cultured and multifaceted with appreciations for highbrow endeavors like free jazz and conceptual art. When pitted against people who have done otherwise, many of us find our skill sets severely lacking.
Sure, it’s easy to boast of being well-spoken, fascinating conversationalists, or possessing “rich souls,” but that doesn’t get the job done any better. And it’s only now, in a recession, that such truth glares out like some monster under the bed. The chant “We are the 99%” might just be translation for “We are upset no one explained this before many of us got to such a dire place.”
But who was going to say anything? Teachers who were too busy giving praise? Parents who were too proud of ever-growing lists of accomplishments? Friends who were in the same boat? There’s no doubt that many people can be faulted for low wages and poor job prospects, but maybe the start of fixing things is taking a little responsibility for our own shortcomings. Of course it wasn’t fair that we were told to cultivate our intellect instead of our worth as part of the workforce, but tough luck: Everyone’s twenties are awful and filled with uncertainty. The onus is on our shoulders to prove that we aren’t just unemployable “emerging adults” who can’t stand being overeducated and underpaid. Maybe getting a job, no matter how “beneath” us it is, is the beginning of the answer.
OWS isn’t something a lot of us truly understand, having been insulated from reality by our rare opportunities, and it isn’t right to pretend otherwise. An expensive education doesn’t make anyone better or more deserving. What should be done is to support the real protesters’ efforts for what they are, and not to co-opting their movement as a platform from which to moan our own discontent. If our educations have given us anything of worth, it should be the ability to recognize the hidden truth behind matters.
The truth is not about how a U of C graduate might deserve to earn more than the minimum wage; it’s about how the economic system put in place by politicians living in the pockets of private interest groups makes it difficult for more than a handful of people to be wealthy. OWS is about fighting the very real problem of socialization of losses and privatization of gains—it’s not about youth entitlement. If college-age students are to participate in the protests, some more research is in order so we don’t fall into the trap of thinking like spoiled children and making the movement about directing blame or bemoaning the injustice of our student loans. And the ultimate truth is that while government economic policy needs to change, our attitude needs to change, too.
Allison Wu is an alumnus of the University of Chicago’s Class of 2011.
This is getting at a problem that’s worth addressing, but in the wrong way. I agree that it’s important that those with privilege understand that the grievances of others can be far more serious than their own–and to a degree that they might be incapable of understanding at first. However, I think that the approach taken in this article is deeply wrong-headed.
We should not denigrate the privileged person’s legitimate personal grievances on the grounds that others have suffered even worse. (“I was told that if I went to this fancy school I would be able to walk out into employment, but this hasn’t worked out” sounds like a legitimate complaint to me.) Denigrating anyone’s sense of being personally wrong is not just unproductive, it is in fact counterproductive. It undermines the privileged person’s motivations for being engaged. It undermines solidarity. (In practice, in the real world, a sense of “white guilt” can be extremely corrosive to attempts to come together in a struggle for social justice across the lines that have been constructed to divide us.)
True, it’s probably a good idea for the privileged person to spend relatively little time voicing personal complaints, and rather a lot of time listening to the complaints of the less privileged. But the privileged person should not reject her/his own complaints as irrelevant or hold back from speaking up on her/his own behalf. Here’s what needs to happen. The privileged person needs to see that the outrages s/he has suffered are part of a system which produces even greater outrages. There is in fact a connection between the UofC student with massive student loan debt, and the woman being fraudulently evicted from her house, on a block that is already full of boarded-up homes, in a neighborhood with absolutely no jobs. One problem is far easier to bear than the other, and this needs to be understood and dealt with. But at some level lesser and greater outrages share a common underlying cause. With this in view, the more privileged and the less privileged can both be full participants in a shared struggle. So that’s how I would suggest we put the grievances of the privileged into context. This path leads to continued engagement on the part of the privileged person, who isn’t made to feel like an interloper in someone else’s fight. It promotes greater solidarity, while respecting the fact that different levels of privilege within the movement must be recognized and addressed.
While I certainly acknowledge the points you make, I think you misapprehend the situation. Here’s why.
Let’s separate, for a moment, OWS and the scenario of a student graduating from a prestigious university (say, UChicago).
How did the UChicago graduate end up there? Perhaps he was admitted based on legacy. Perhaps not. Let’s give him the benefit of doubt and assume he got in on merit. Four years later, he has been exposed to, inarguably, some of the finest minds on the planet, some of the most challenging standards of thought around, and has performed real work in a variety of disciplines, the effect of which has been to prepare his mind and disposition toward the future. This future, of course, relies on what he did while a student. Perhaps he majored in Philosophy. Not, one might claim, a very ‘marketable degree.’ This in itself exposes two flaws. First of all, since when was education a passport to a job? Education has never been a credentialing service. Go to a vocational school for that. Second, deriving from the first, ‘marketable’ is an extremely demented way to view the goals of education. The so-called free market is utterly whimsical, and changes its ‘valuations’ ever so often. Over the long duration of history, do you really want to trust the corpus of human thought to the whims of a market that decides today to valorize marketing studies and to celebrate literary analysis 30 years later? Yet back in the heyday of cultural studies, a training in feminist theory was a sure path toward a tenure-track job. So much for the free market. Further, my pet UChicago graduate, having majored in Philosophy, is infinitely better-prepared than someone graduating in financial studies, simply because of the hardcore intellectual training the UChicago graduate has received. What’s more, while the financial studies major can only develop skills within a narrow range, a training in Philosophy ensures far more versatility (as shown by numerous studies demonstrating the high general aptitude of philosophy students, as well as the high median salaries of philosophy graduates).
Quite apart from all of this, I’m going to suggest that a UChicago, or Stanford, or Carnegie Mellon graduate quite rightly deserves to walk on a different plane than a community college graduate. Perhaps carpentry is more ‘valued’ by the ‘free market’ today, but that certainly does not mean the pursuits of high culture and high modernism are somehow useless. Recall Maslow’s Hierarchy, and apply a similar concept here. The person who can freely discuss free jazz, Futurism, Freud, and Fellini is infinitely more developed, as a human being, as a conscious person, than the carpenter who can only hammer away at wood and nails. I do not find it conscionable to decree that graduating from an elite university does not entitle you to an elite life. You worked to get here. You graduated. You are part of a select few. Don’t denigrate that.
At commenter #2- You entirely neglect the issue of circumstantial inequality in your effort to feel good about being privileged, a stark contrast to the pervasive and in extreme cases self-destructive class-guilt of many undergrads here. Doesn’t the carpenter work hard? DOesn’t the nurse, or the plumber, or the factory hand making $12 an hour for life? Almost everyone works hard, simply to make ends meet. Not everyone has the opportunity to study hard and get into a great school, thanks to the interventions of attentive and intentioned parents, school counselors, a well-funded high school education with supplemental lessons and tutoring and a mother to drive you to soccer practice or whatever. Don’t be so quick to pat yourself on the back, and condemn the 99% “to eat cake,” or jigou jitoku.
On the article- personally, I think you are overstating and to a large extent projecting your own internal struggle with your intentions for joining our common movement, and having held short of joining for “the wrong reasons,” you now hasten to warn off others lest they fall into the trap you’ve articulated.
Certainly there’s some truth to your criticism that students of an elite institution haven’t got it as hard as the under and unemployed, and that they very often come from monied backgrounds, leading to a certain element of bad faith when such students mount the barricades.
But it’s important to note that many students, even here with it’s exorbitant tuition, aren’t from money, and are entirely justified in their fears about literally drowning in debt after graduation, or being relegated to a life-time of unhappy drudgery (everyone student’s biggest fear).
At any rate, #Occupy needs every body it can get. The movement is losing momentum, and students typically have more time to give than single mothers or laid-off fathers. In other words, those hardest hit by our system of self-perpetuating inequality are the least able to get their voices heard. Further, #Occupy is already such a wonderfully spontaneous, multi-vocal and amorphous movement that it has room for student complaints as well. Since, arguably, all of our common problems stem from the same systemic rot, the movement is not hurt by certain elements of selfishness. Just keep the scale and varieties of inequality fixed in your mind, and all can be brought together.
While students do need to take personal responsibility for acquiring practical skills in their education,I agree with CT that the author is projecting her own internal struggles. However, I am wary of hasty generalizations about the experience of the “talented and gifted.” How many of us were taking classes in art and conceptual jazz? We didn’t get into elite universities for being “well-spoken, fascinating conversationalists, or possessing ‘rich souls’”; we got in because we worked our asses off in the most challenging math and science tracks our high schools offered. I disagree that with CT that everyone works hard when given a chance to. The rampant academic dishonesty in my elementary and high school made it clear that very few people are truly hard-working.
In fact, some of the “talented and gifted” spend their entire childhoods being ridiculed for caring about school – not what I would call encouragement. I was never given a free pass by teachers. I experienced the opposite: exacting teachers with unattainable standards, who gave half-praise for full-hearted efforts, while peers who chose less competitive tracks got away with coasting. Not all of us are the beneficiaries of rare opportunities. Not all of us are so fortunate as to have proud parents.
Failing to get a financial return on $200,000 is hardly trivial. It’s unfair to dismiss elite graduates and students as not having “real problems.” If they are now unemployed or just barely employed, how are those not real problems? The ability to support oneself through employment is a basic need. What more pressing concerns do other occupiers experience?
I am merely saying that OWS was and still is a bit of a peer pressure wave. Sure, I am speaking of my own conflicts; I’d be an irresponsible writer if I wasn’t. But what I am saying is that students need to realize the short-comings of a truly “liberal arts” educations. Maybe that’s something that can be understood only with the slightly jarring experience of graduation. It’s a piece of wisdom that is commonly realized in those awkward months after the June bagpipes.
The “real” problem is not caused by being unemployed, it’s from being unemployable because people are often times too arrogant to take jobs that are deemed lower than their ability. If your first job is doing bitch work, you should still do it with a smile no matter how much you think you’re above it. We can all disagree about how our childhoods were and whatever, but the fact is that no one deserves anything.