One weird feature of my life is that while my experiences in college and graduate school were, on the whole, incredibly positive, I feel a lot of anger towards both schools I attended.
I try to hold both sides of that equation loosely. At Baylor I met my wife and became an academic in some real sense. So many central influences on my thinking (Bonhoeffer, Camus, Woolf, Angela Davis, William James, Du Bois, Marx, Derrida...the list really feels endless) were writers I first encountered in classes at Baylor.
It was also, during my time there, a school led by an Bond villain undergoing a protracted sexual assault scandal while actively discriminating against queer students. I encountered Nietzsche first in a class on moral philosophy that was designed around flattening him into a “nihilist” and then arguing for the rest of the semester that the only viable moral system is, basically, Christian ethics augmented by Kant. Most of the Baylor sports fanbase, including students and alumni, vociferously defended Art Briles and Shawn Oakman while begrudgingly rooting for Brittney Griner, tolerating or making bigoted jokes at her expense.
My time at Arkansas was much the same: I was incredibly lucky in finding friends and teachers who shaped me and helped me become the poet and teacher I am. I speak often about how utterly out of my depth I felt in my first workshop, taught and taken by several of my favorite living poets. Out of my depth, and fully aware of what an incredible environment for growth I was in.
And the University of Arkansas was also a place where the influence of the Waltons and Tysons was a constant and embarrassing political interventions by state government were far too common. I taught many, many classes in Old Main, and thus found myself daily walking past the statue of an inveterate racist whose white supremacist legal philosophy has now found purchase in the White House.
To return to Baylor for a moment, I was part of the newly-established Crane Scholars program there, named after Baylor president William Carey Crane. When I asked about the name, one of the professors involved mentioned that Crane was chosen because of his steadfast support of Christian education. I didn’t learn until years later on my own curiosity that, like so many other parochial educators in the South, his commitment to Christian education was explicitly in opposition to the Reconstruction-era school systems providing public education to students of all races for the first time. (My citation given above requires a little reading against the grain. I recommend Black Reconstruction in America as a starting-point for understanding Southern public education. Eve Ewing’s new book also addresses some of this as well, in much more readable form.)
The thing I wish I could beam into everyone’s brains about higher education is this: the legal/political/sports-franchise-owning/real-estate-developing entity that most universities are on paper has almost nothing to do with the classroom experience that students and teachers make together every day on campuses or in Zoom sessions. The administration, which ultimately administers the legal and financial wrapping around the vital function of the classroom, loves to claim education as its purpose when it is convenient. But to understand our universities as unified wholes rather than battlefields for competing interests is naive, full-stop. As one of my professors put it to me one time: “You can love the work. The real work. But a university can’t love you back, so don’t fall in love with the university.” Yep!
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