Minima
17th January 2012, 08:10
Notes: I didn't vote in favor of getting involved with a protest about student loans. And now we are supposed to have a "press release" as Occupy Education at this date. I am now forced to help make this synthesized statement, which supposedly represents all of occupy at my university. as frustrated I am with the project itself, I thought I'd give it a shot.
Please add your own ideas, reword my cringe-worthy sentences, add more rhetoric, hyperbole and bombast, whatever you want. And please critique it!
Text:
(Thoughts and shared visions from Jan 15th) “As participants of Occupy Education, we feel not so concerned that someone finds it appropriate to spend their academic careers spewing out doctrinal neo-liberal bullshit, but a deep concern over the infuriating fact that students have no say in these processes, while a problematic tenure system, and the institutional influence of corporate funding have distorted the ethical and academic values of the University to a level where students seeking to learn are finding themselves alienated in a system that is meant to support and foster engagement, and where the forces least interested in education and the public commons are given the greatest control. The corporatization of Universities has lead to rampant careerism responsible for the erosion of ethical and academic values in nearly every discipline, and a mechanism through which the majority and the disadvantaged, find themselves channeled through an institution which functionally has the effect of producing a complacent workforce unable to critically challenge this system, a workforce which then finds no political recourse in an electoral system that suffers the same the same systemic illnesses.
We are done with the banal politics of self-interested demands in competition with other public sectors over government money, under a fiscally conservative and unsympathetic administration willing to pit us against our own, and seek move beyond issues of student financing which are an integral part of this very system. Understanding the properly systemic nature of these problems, we recognize that our engagement in personal and private spheres is not enough, and that we must change the structures of governance and power in order for meaningful and sustained change to take place. Our first demand therefore is the ultimate demand, of nothing, and everything at once, and our goal, to fight for a democratic and rational method of decision making for the students and the greater society and to thus change the education system for the better.”
Please add your own ideas, reword my cringe-worthy sentences, add more rhetoric, hyperbole and bombast, whatever you want. And please critique it!
Text:
(Thoughts and shared visions from Jan 15th) “As participants of Occupy Education, we feel not so concerned that someone finds it appropriate to spend their academic careers spewing out doctrinal neo-liberal bullshit, but a deep concern over the infuriating fact that students have no say in these processes, while a problematic tenure system, and the institutional influence of corporate funding have distorted the ethical and academic values of the University to a level where students seeking to learn are finding themselves alienated in a system that is meant to support and foster engagement, and where the forces least interested in education and the public commons are given the greatest control. The corporatization of Universities has lead to rampant careerism responsible for the erosion of ethical and academic values in nearly every discipline, and a mechanism through which the majority and the disadvantaged, find themselves channeled through an institution which functionally has the effect of producing a complacent workforce unable to critically challenge this system, a workforce which then finds no political recourse in an electoral system that suffers the same the same systemic illnesses.
We are done with the banal politics of self-interested demands in competition with other public sectors over government money, under a fiscally conservative and unsympathetic administration willing to pit us against our own, and seek move beyond issues of student financing which are an integral part of this very system. Understanding the properly systemic nature of these problems, we recognize that our engagement in personal and private spheres is not enough, and that we must change the structures of governance and power in order for meaningful and sustained change to take place. Our first demand therefore is the ultimate demand, of nothing, and everything at once, and our goal, to fight for a democratic and rational method of decision making for the students and the greater society and to thus change the education system for the better.”