Good Evening Friends,

I want to talk about something I learned just a few weeks ago. This is one of those things that appear to be a revelation at the time, but feel absurdly obvious when you think about it. I want to talk about the education bubble of the 1960s.

There seem to have been at least two sources of this bubble, the G.I. Bill of the 1940s (1) and the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (2).

We should start by taking a look at how words can lose their meaning and become devalued over time. One of the words that became degraded, after the 1960s, according to Paul Fussell, was 'institute.' In his book Class: A Guide through the American Status System (1983) he wrote: "You can estimate the current prestige of the higher-educational establishment by considering the way everyone wants to imitate it. When an institution devoted to profit or deception or huckstering wants to elevate its status, it pretends to be a university" (3).

Fussell called out the New York Times, with its pretentious "Weekly News Quiz," as if it were an educational institution. Brokerage firms and real estate "rackets" conduct(ed) so-called seminars (4). Indeed, "[t]he most naked lobbies in Washington, those most deeply dyed in the practices of bribery and coercion, like to call themselves institutes, as if they were the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton or the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennslyvania" (5).

By the time Fussell published his book there was the Tobacco Institute, The Alcoholic Beverage Institute, the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils, and so forth. Some of these institutes had "professorships" and "chairs" (6).

"The lust of all classes to acquire status by attaching themselves to universities, learned societies, "science," and the like - anything but commerce and manufacturing and "marketing" - can be seen in the way, for example, the Morgan Library attracts contributors of money by designating them not Donors or Benefactors, but "Fellows" (7).

I want to remind you of three things in looking at this quote:

A) the lust of all classes... We talked about the universal tendency of class mimicry. Man is the desire to become God.

B) anything but commerce and manufacturing and "marketing." The tendency of business to run away from commerce and manufacturing in their public relations, is, as we have said, but symptomatic of capitalism's (as the latest expression of elite wealth accumulation) tendency to remove itself, more and more, from production. This has to do with the New Money/Old Money dynamic.

C) The desire of big business to "market" itself as something other than it is, as "educational institutions," is something already familiar to us from The Godfather, in which Vito Corleone expressed his desire to turn his "family" into a modern, legal, corporate entity with lawyers, each of who could "steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks." This is also familiar to us from the analysis of capitalism today offered by Naomi Klein in her book, NoLogo.

From the tenth anniversay edition of her book, we learned the story of how the makers of Altoids spent 250 thousand dollars to buy some artwork by several emerging artists. Remember, they put on their own event called the "Curiously Strong Collection"? We were told what was involved in this, the desire that we "become collectively convinced not that corporations are hitching a ride on our cultural and communal activities, but that creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity" (p.35). I also had said that as a candy maker, the executives their probably got to thinking there has to be more than this. Candy doesn't make the world go around.

I'll continue in another post.

wingedcentaur

1) Fussell, Paul. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Summit Books. New York, 1983. p.136

2) ibid, p.135

3)pp.128-129

4)p.129

5)p.129

6)p.129

7)p.129