students

[Sam Pawlett]

Friends, Romans and Countrymen:Here's another confessional. I spent 7
years on and off in academia at Simon Fraser U. in Vancouver(89-96,
17-24) accumulating a nice stack of diplomas one of which was in
economics.  Did some grad work on the top floor of the ivory tower in
the philosophy dpt. Most undergrads are generally quite intelligent but
their sensibilities and priorities are dull from the anti-intellectual
and anti-critical culture we live in. Most attend universities in hope
that a diploma will get them a high paying white collar job. If someone
told them that a B.A. or BSc isn't going to help you one bit in the
labor market, 90% of the students would drop out. Most are not at
university for the sake of learning and intellectual curiosity. Some
don't want to be there at all since their parents force them to go. Most
econ majors are cast-offs from the Business Admin. dpt who couldn't cut
the mustard there for various reasons, puzzling since the "turkey
filter" is the same in both dpts: calculus and stats. The "turkey
filter" in the phil. dpt is always symbolic logic. Most undergrads are
really young which limits what they can get out of university. Being a
student is one way of avoiding unemployment and the dole. As was said on
a delightful episode of The Simpsons "Now unemployment lines aren't just
for philosophy majors!" People on student loans( about 60% here in
Canada) would otherwise be on welfare. 1 in 5 persons between 17&25 is
in some form of higher education in the Vancouver area. The avrage
student debt load is C$30,000. I was fortunate in that I accumulated no
(monetary) debts at university. University here is still open to the
working class since tuition at all Can. universities is about C$2000 per
year. The way things are going this is not going to last long. One of
the best teachers I had was the token radical( and former pen-l'er) in
the SFU econ dpt Mike Lebowitz.( two rads is a conspiracy as Mike would
say). I was the only Marxist among over 500 other econ majors. One of
the best courses I took was Mike's Comparative Economics. We read
Kornai, Brus&Laski, Nove's History of the USSR, Bukharin,
Preobrazenskii,Michael Ellman on planning and a host of NEP era Soviet
economists in one semester. I quite frankly don't know how radical
economists do it. Isn't there a lot of professional isolation? Mike
began the class with Rawls' thought experiment. Either everyone in the
class gets a B or half get A's and half get F's( drawn from a hat). The
libertarian econ majors came to a unanimous decision that everyone would
get a B.Kind of funny. Most leftish students are attracted to more sexy
dpts like English lit. or Communication studies. An old prof/friend of
mine Kathleen Akins just recieved a 1 million dollar Macdonnell Douglas
grant to study the connection between neuroscience and the phil of mind.
Generally I am really down on young people, but the nineties are an
awful time to be a young person(I'm 26).

Sam Pawlett

"history is the graveyard of aristocracies"
--Rumpole of the Bailey