The Sad State of Higher Ed.

I promise that this screed will not be a "back when I was in school" diatribe, although it may sound like it at points. Front page of the Washington Post this morning. No, it's not a big story on the continuing criminal actions of the Bush administration (where did those stories go, by the way?). Certainly the story on shattered Lebanon isn't featured (it's there, but in narrow columns headed with the leading "Armed with Iran's Millions, Fighters Turn to Rebuilding"). No, what's featured is a story on a new high-rise "dorm" that isn't located on any campus, but rather serves as a commuting base for nine area colleges to warehouse the students that they're unwilling to build their own dorm space for.

Ah, campus life. I remember unpacking my stuff in my dorm room, meeting my roommate (disclosure: I knew my roommate from high school), and then getting ready for the 40 minute commute to class. What a bunch of bullshit. In the continuing saga of universities losing focus on education and turning themselves into another sector of the burgeoning service industry, this hoteling concept is pretty disgusting.

Dorms are supposed to be dorms, not luxury suites. I was appalled when I arrived at my graduate school -- and no I didn't live on campus as such a thing as grad student housing didn't exist at the institution -- and found that students didn't live in dorms so much as they lived in little apartments. There was no dining hall to speak of, even for the undergrads. Of course, in a year or two I realized I'd managed to enroll in a university that didn't make education a priority, but rather saw education as a great cover for real estate investment. By the time I knew it was a joke, it was too late and I was stuck.

Anyway, the main point is that dorm life should be a bit more like monastic life than like MTV Cribs. The primary purpose and advantage -- yes, advantage -- of living in a dorm is that you are placed in the middle of studies and are reminded at every moment that you're at a university. Not that every moment you could be watching Entourage on HBO On Demand. Or in my case a Columbo marathon on A & E.

I'll give them the high speed internet -- the internet is a highly useful research tool, esp. with the availability of scholarly journals through the university library. Of course, it's more likely that high speed connection will be used to develop one's virtual life in World of Warcraft than to check out articles on Brecht's verfremdungseffekt from JStor.

All of which reminds me, why should we even go to college? If you can live in the fake dorm in an office park and pretend you're actually living at school, why even bother leaving your bedroom? Why not just purchase a copy of the Sims 2 University and live the multi-faceted possibilities available to our virtual selves rather than the singular choices found in our "real" lives? I imagine that in future iterations, the developers could work with actual universities to develop real course content and allow users to "take classes" for credit -- after all, it's only a short bridge between the virtual experience of the SIMS universe and the virtual classroom of online courses.

We are, after all, only consumers and education is simply another commodity to consume. As the lines between information, education, and entertainment disappear, we'll all be able to purchase the proper expansion packs for our appropriate degrees and then we'll have reached the magical plateau where we can "have read books" without ever having to read them.

Like the uncut pages in Gatsby's impressive library.