Held Hostage by Delusions

Now that Occupy Portland is looking for a new place to crash, it’s eyeing a relationship with Portland State University students.

Carrie Medina, social media liaison for Occupy Portland, told the PSU Vanguard, that if Occupy Portland doesn’t set up tents on the South Park Blocks near the school, it might place information stations on campus to recruit students.

She said the South Park Blocks would be an ideal location for Occupy protesters, “because of their proximity to the center of downtown and because it would allow the movement to further involve PSU students in the protest.”

If Occupy Portland has visions of repeating the heyday of Vietnam War protests, it needs a reality check: This is not the 1960’s, and Walter Cronkite is dead.

There are reasons why dragging college students into Occupy Portland’s cause would not be wise: Many young adults in the Occupy movements blame the baby boomers for America’s current economic problems. Why should we assume that college students today are any wiser than the college-age baby boomers that protested in the 60’s and 70’s? (Overheard at a quiet vigil Saturday night marking the anniversary of the deadline to vacate Occupy Portland’s downtown encampments: “You were around how many years, and what have you done?”)

Stirring up trouble on campus could hurt students who are serious about graduating. According to the Vanguard, when Portland police alerted university officials that Occupy Portland might move to the park blocks last week, campus police temporarily closed the library and other school buildings, which were not equipped to handle squatters. If you were a PSU student at the library, you would have been forced to interrupt your studies – studies that you (or your parents) are paying for – to accommodate someone who thinks interfering with your studies is going to make things better in America.

It’s unclear what PSU students would learn from Occupy Portland. A photograph in the Portland Spectator, a magazine published on campus, shows a grey-haired couple participating in an Occupy protest and holding a sign, “Youth deserve free college, jobs, and a decent life.”

You would think two people who’ve lived long enough to have grey hair would know better. Nothing is free, especially college. Somebody has to pay for the faculty’s salaries, the classrooms, research materials and supplies, support staff, maintenance of the campus and much more. The only students who receive close to a free education are those awarded full scholarships, usually based on merit or athletic talent. If we made college free to everyone, college wouldn’t mean much.

Americans have already done a good job at making college meaningless. A book published in 1983 called “Class” by Paul Fussell pointed out, “The educational system has been effectively appropriated by the upper strata and transformed into an instrument which tends to reproduce the class structure and transmit inequality.”

How so? The wealthy send their children to a handful of colleges that are regarded as the best, while the rest of Americans settle for any college.

They have come to regard college as part of the American dream and as a way to move up in class. Fussell quotes one of them bragging in the 1970s: “There are two universities in England, four in France . . . and thirty-seven in Ohio.”

In 21st Century America not a single state university law school is apparently good enough to produce a U.S. Supreme Court justice. All current justices graduated from one of two law schools: Harvard or Yale. (This prejudice is shared by all presidents, whether they are Republican or Democrat.)

The college swindle, as Fussell called it 28 years ago, has only gotten worse. Check out Craigslist and notice the jobs that require a college degree but start at $11 an hour. (And notice the jobs requiring a GED or high school diploma that also start at about $11 an hour.) These are not jobs for the graduates of colleges attended by the sons and daughters of Congressmen, Senators or Presidents.

This is probably not an issue that Occupy Portland will bring to PSU, and it’s not one that PSU faculty and administration would embrace. Last week when 200 students and faculty launched Occupy PSU by walking out of class, according to the Vanguard they marched against “tuition increases, large class sizes, poor faculty compensation and decreased state funding for higher education.”

The Vanguard ran a photo of a 24-year-old PSU graduate, described as unable to find a job, burning a copy of his diploma. Considering that it was a copy – and not the original – his statement was more a whimper than a shout. And it was not directed at the lack of intellectual rigor required to obtain the degree – but at the lack of practical results, i.e. a job.

But PSU students are not pushovers for Occupy Portland. Vanguard writer Joe Mantecon wrote about the real Guy Fawkes, whose face has been turned into a mischievous mask popular with Occupiers.

Mantecon writes, “The visage of Guy Fawkes is this generation’s Che Guevara poster. He represents revolution – the triumph of the popular will over the faceless establishment, the anonymity of the individual for the sake of shared sentiment. He is the stalwart champion of the people, the bane of authoritarian government. … Except for the fact that it’s all horrible, preposterous lies.”

Instead of false working-class heroes, the Occupy movement could use a dose of critical thinking while trying to form some solutions.

The day after Occupy PSU started, another 200 people turned out for a public lecture by PSU philosophy professor Peter Boghossian on “Faith, Belief and Hope: From Cognitive Sickness to Moral Value and Back Again.”

He targets faith-based believers, but what he says about people who blindly believe in the Dalai Lama’s reincarnations or Mohammed and the Koran could apply to anyone deluded by long-held political beliefs.

The biggest applause of the evening came when he declared, “People are sick and tired of being held hostage to the delusions of other people.”

Even in a college classroom, where there should be lively discussion, certain beliefs are accepted without question – for example, that spiritual people are more just, more kind, more noble.

To Mohammed’s followers, Boghossian dares to ask, “How do you know he wasn’t schizophrenic?”

It’s a question that deserves to be raised – but rarely is – when a U.S. presidential candidate says God has spoken to him directly.

“Why do we cower …?” Boghossian asked. “Do you want to sit at the adult table? … If you want to live in make-believe land, go to the children’s table.”

He’s not out to take a religion crutch away from people. He wants them to replace it with reason and rationality.

“This is not about abortion, gun control or women’s rights … This is about a process that is reliable, that will bring you to the truth … (and) align your beliefs with reality.”

It could be useful advice to Occupy Portland’s manifesto writers each time they release another list of demands.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

2 Comments

  • That seems a high turnout for a philosophy lecture. Did he require his students to attend? Some of the crowd could’ve been from Occupy.

  • It was a higher turnout than expected; they had to move it to another location. Boghossian mentioned that he spotted a couple of his students in the audience. One young woman who challenged him during the Q-and-A that followed the lecture acknowledged that she had taken a class from him. Most of the audience looked to be mid-30s and older.

    Based on my conversations with some of the audience members before and after the lecture, they were sympathetic to 99-percenters but not necessarily to Occupy Portland.

    Pamela

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