A Note Before You Join
The university is a scam, an ever-hungry succubus needing the blood of all society’s working members to keep it running so that the separations of race and class that allows Americana to sleep at night remain.
To you, dear student, who is on the precipice of a new beginning while facing another ending of the life you had before the university, I say congratulations because what you have done is no small accomplishment. Each of us comes from a unique culmination of experiences that create an individual who is forever evolving, despite living in a world fixated on sameness for the sake of convenience and economic profit. Though I will speak of the university with pangs of resentment, do not let my forthcoming words of frustration sour this moment, a culmination of your hard work and your sacrifices. In this world of academia where you will be taught to silence yourself out of fear of losing potential networks, this moment of your first acceptance is one of the few moments, which will be innocent.
When school feels as if it was made to completely destroy your sense of self without offering any concrete tools or plans to reconstruct yourself, you will look back at this moment of your first acceptance with fondness for its bliss. You will chase this taste of bliss because it is a taste unlike any you have ever experienced before. This taste, so new because it has been constructed in the university factories, where the base ingredients are the deceptions against exclusion. In the university, you will be led to believe that your mind is enough. That in these brick buildings built by the enslaved on the lands of the slaughtered, you can escape the A,B,C’s of education inequality where:
A is for Ableism, Abject Poverty, Access
B is for Brutality
C is for Colorism, Colonization, Class
D is for Documentation, Discrimination, Debt
E is for Employment
F is for Family, Food, Funding
G is for Gender Identity
H is for Health
I is for Immigrant, Income, Intergenerational Trauma
J is for Jail
K is for Keycard
L is for Law
M is for Money, Minority, Mobility
N is for Nationality, Network, Networth
O is for “Opportunity”
P is for Police, Policies, Profiling
Q is for Queerness
R is for Resources, Redlining, Region
S is for Sexuality, Systematic, Social Stratification
T is for Time, Technology, Trauma
U is for Unemployment
V is for Visa, Veteran, Visibility
X is for Xenophobia
Y is for Yield Protection
Z is for the Zero Interest Scam, made for you to accumulate debt that will not be paid-off after the promotional period ends.
These universities were not built for us. The founders wanted these buildings for their sons, grandsons, and great great grandsons who they deemed worthy of belonging in their new world. Never did they imagine the “things’’ that they considered 3/5th of a person attending their schools, teaching in their schools, or deaning their schools. Since the world has attempted to camouflage its overt exclusion, the university has tried to adapt to changing times. They have named buildings after the “firsts” of us who graduated. They have established committees who screen and select the ones that fit the criteria to become the model minorities, and act as proof that the university is and will always be a space for inclusion. From their donations and endowments, the universities will offer scholarships, health insurance, and a simulated escape from the world. And while in these escapist years, you will be fed the hope that your degree will lead to a better life.
But in fact, the university is a scam, an ever-hungry succubus needing the blood of all society’s working members to keep it running so that the separations of race and class that allows Americana to sleep at night remain.
And, dear student, the university’s sleight of hand is so ingenious that I want to try and expose some of its machinery now to save you from a few restless nights filled with resentment. By removing the student from their homes and having the student feel as if this was indeed their choice, and not a choice of how to survive in an inflating, classist economy, the university configures itself as the student’s new home, which is a safe haven from their first home. In this second home, you are encouraged to live on campus, eat on campus, and study on campus. It is no surprise that when attempting to leave campus, the university students face several struggles with transportation costs, logistical issues with housing, and overall concerns related to safety.
The university needs on-campus housing to not only justify its ever-increasing cost, but more importantly, to ensure that we are subjugated to being the same. Similar dorm structures, similar meal plans, similar classrooms help program the belief that with this university, you are the same as your roommate and classmate. Never mind that your classmates spend the summer in the Hamptons and you spend your summer at three jobs to try and pay for the school year because you are in the pursuit of education. And if you ever want to discuss the inequalities, there are your neighbors and there are your theories, which can give the simulation of a lived experience.
Since your university is your new home that you will venture off to with excitement and possible congratulatory celebration from teachers, families, or friends, you will not revolt against it. You will reconfigure the glimpses of inequalities, which are the breaking down the university’s mirage, to be teaspoons of honey, reminding you to work harder because there is so much work to be done to make the university a more inclusive space.
Ah yes, dear student, you will be dutiful. If you chose to revolt, you risk the fear of expulsion, which ultimately means losing many of the base necessities of life such as housing, health insurance, and food, which the university has provided. And if you are not expelled but have spent your time screaming and ringing the bells of injustice, you run the risk of being blacklisted as one who is unable to adapt to the culture of academia.
Rather than allowing our atoms to separate and cause a fission of brilliance, creating a glow that will expose another way of learning and functioning in this society, the university would rather have us remain the same, bouncing with the same ideas, with the same people so that our thoughts “for more” or “what else” will not overpower them and remain in theory, never in practice. Because if we dared to take our theories into practice, if we revolted with the strength of our disappointments, our fears, our debts, our resentments, then the machine would combust. After its combustion, we would be forced to forge through the scraps, and decide which pieces of the university we want to keep, and which pieces should be left burning until they became ashes.
Universities are designed to keep us indebted to another institution more fixated on money than life. In the middle of a pandemic, an unprecedented time in history, the university is more concerned with ensuring that Fall Semester will begin, than which students will be healthy enough to return to campus, or which students are dealing with the first deaths of family or community members. Even though the universities’ system of a life and education on campus that is used to justify their prices is flatlining, the universities are still charging a gouging amount for an education.
Dear students, you must never forget that to the universities, we are only potential investments who will later feed their endowments. To universities, we are pet projects. They, the universities, will strip us of our skin, toss away our flesh, and reassemble our bones until they are numbers for a PowerPoint presentation.
Who does the university benefit but a lucky few who are taught to behave like crabs in a bucket, believing that if they sacrifice everything, if they continuously uproot their lives and divorce themselves from the only real communities that they have known, then they too will have a chance in a world that devalues and disregards knowledge. Furthermore, in this world that devalues knowledge, we must ask ourselves, “Who is this knowledge for?” If you fall into the trap that you are one of the chosen few only meant to communicate with other chosen few, then you are left in an echo-box filled with words only good for a Jeopardy category, an SAT practice test, or a game of Scrabble.
In a world where there are riots in the streets because the blood never left the leaves, what is the point of knowledge? And I follow this question with another, directed at you, dear student, what is the point of attending university? If this university is indeed a scam. If this world is determined to make us pieces of machinery. If knowledge can be replaced with sensational lies. If every endeavor we make to better ourselves is undercut by capitalism and the inequalities embedded in this nation to keep it running, then what is the point of a hungering for knowledge and aligning oneself with the university, the gatekeeper?
Right now, we are in a time of no “the point” of this or “the point of that.” It is a time of Trump, shelter-in place, of an ended #MeToo. It is a time of post Brexit, and the beginnings of the next Depression. Our streets are burning and there are children in concentration camps. Trauma is the currency for communication and death is breathing down our necks.
You are witnessing the world as you know it, destroying itself, as you are sensing your mind reconfiguring into your university’s moldings. As your flesh is becoming the scaffolding for another diversity and inclusion plan, and you or your family is coming closer to a generation of financial ruin, you better take all that you can. You better reap from the universities as they are harvesting your mind, using your labor, sucking your soul, and renting your body as a showcase. And if you are not too changed by the university, if you are able to return to your communities and if they will have you, then use what you have reaped and experienced to make your community stronger so that one day we can burn down universities and this nation. And after we have put the fires out, then we the nation’s new, will decide what to build next, before the nation next burns and rebuilds again.
J K Chukwu is a half Nigerian, half Detroitian writer from the Midwest. She received her MFA from Brown University. During her time at Brown, she was awarded the Mark Baumer Prize for Language Art, and was the two time winner of the Frances Mason Harris ’26 manuscript prize. Her writing is rooted in examining the strangeness, depravity, and trauma that is contained in everyday life. She was a 2019 Lambda Fellow and her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, TAYO, and elsewhere. Her audio essay, “Love Sounds,” published by A Velvet Giant was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
