the history of the university - part one

a personal reflection

One of the paradoxes of my life has been my education. Twelve years of Catholic schooling in affluent North Shore Chicago both privileged and traumatised me. I learned to write essays and puzzle out algebra formulas, give presentations and recite the catechism, dress with comportment and sing for an audience. There was no question but that I could (and would) attend university. It was assumed that I would join the professional class and also marry into it. The world, I was told repeatedly, was mine for the taking, as long as I followed instructions. But at what cost to my actual wellbeing? It took me decades to recover from how utterly fucked up this upbringing was, on a human and spiritual level. And although I'm still learning to untangle knots that got tied in that time, I did receive a real gift of catharsis by going mad. That particular experience did me a world of good.

My parents worked immensely hard to put their four children through private, tuitioned education. They didn't come from money, but they were educated and middle-class and they loved achievement. Both of them valued scholarship and intellect; our home was filled with books and our second home was the local library. And their aspirations for us were noble enough; they encourged but didn't pressure us to make high marks, and they never leaned on us about making big money or tried to corner us into lofty goals such as being a doctor or lawyer (though that would have pleased them immensely!)

I did well at school academically - but much less well socially. I lingered at the margins of my peer group and I resented the hypocrisy of my community. The Christian gospel messages were drummed into us, but the crude materialism of wealth, the preoccupation with social status, the bitchy and relentless competition both inside and outside the classroom – these were the real lessons. I wasn't able at that stage of my life to articulate why it disturbed me so much; all I knew was that I was more or less miserable in my surroundings. My bitter complaints were met at home with bewilderment; my parents meant well and wanted the best for me. Could I not see that my fine education would serve me well throughout my life?

And yes, I do see how well my education has served me. My literacy allows me to access information from the institutions which gatekeep it, and to participate in expressive spaces such as substack; my numeracy allows me to earn a salary in a job which involves some degree of financial acumen; and my social training allows me to face new situations with confidence that I will be met with respect and engagement. But I return to that earlier point: the real education I received was about how to thrive in a materialistic, competitive, controlling and abusive culture, and that was traumatising. It was surrepticiously dehumanising, and spiritually vacant.

One of my notes from last week's lecture with Dr LeFrancois offers the stark observation: “the history of the university is the history of whiteness.” That was a fresh spin of thought for me, though it rang very true and didn't surprise me. These private, religiously administered academies I attended were advertised to my parents as a “college preparatory” curriculum; college prep for short. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say “colonialism prep.”

In Chicago, the white professional class lived mainly in the northern city neighbourhoods and up along into the suburbs beside Lake Michigan (hence the area named 'North Shore'); the Hispanic and Asian immigrant communities lived mostly on the west end of the city; and the African Americans lived predominantly on the southside. And the Native Americans? The original people of our region, whose 'place of wild onions' became the city named Chicago? We knew NOTHING about them. It was simply never mentioned. If any Indigenous people remained living nearby, I certainly never met them.

In my primary school class, there was one child only with black skin. Her name was Maria and she arrived in sixth grade, but she sat in a different classroom to mine. Whenever I did encounter her, I thought she seemed unfriendly, haughty and distant. In hindsight, I recognise that this would have been a defensive facade to help her cope in an environment where she was so racially isolated, perhaps even persecuted. I don't have any memories of her being bullied, just vague images of her standing with a group of her classmates on the playground. (Having said that, the group to which she belonged outranked my own band of misfits, so she did have some social collatoral.) However I wasn't in her classroom cohort and I don't know what kind of language was used there or how she was received in general. Junior High is a warzone of pre-teen viciousness in any case, so being outnumbered sixty-to-one by the white kids in her year group surely constituted a challenge: the trauma she will have experienced must far exceed my own.

High school was an all-girls college prep school run by a Dominican order of nuns. (Incidentally, this interesting post describes the history of the Dominican order in the context of its Latin American colonisation and refers to Dominicans as “the intellectual backbone of the Inquisition.” ) The school campus lay near Winnetka, a leafy suburb full of mansion houses that had been built by industrial capital in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Here the composition of the student body was slightly more diverse, in that there were a small number of Black and Hispanic girls attending – as well as scholarship kids from working class families in the city. But the majority of my fellow students were like me: middle-class Caucasians whose ancestors had settled the United States and decimated or displaced the Indigenous population.

So yes, my childhood was embedded in racist, colonialist histories, structures and systems. My inevitable attendance at university, and subsequent progression to postgraduate level, vividly illustrates Dr LeFrancois' observation about the entwined functions of educational insitutions and the Western imperial project.

(All this lays the groundwork for what I'd like to write about next, about mad knowledge. It will have to wait, however, for another post, as I must now go pack my suitcase for a trip out of town. Until then… thank you for reading.)