I’m the product of public schools, from pre-K through the PhD. My early education was in Virginia, first in little schools on the rural western side of the state, later at an eastern college founded by colonists. Then at twenty-three I packed off to graduate school in suburban California, tasked with reading books on a lotus coast, once again on scholarships, grants, fellowships from a state.
Simply put, a great deal of social-democratic investment helped create me, the person who now teaches at private university in a vast, churning metropolis. I worked hard; I’ve been lucky; but the well-laid plans of the State are an enormous part of my cultural-capital (if not actual-capital) intensive “Success” ca. 2022. Tell my granddad who laid railroad ties in Monroe County, West Virginia that I grew up to be a professor. He paid taxes so I could.
I started college in the fall of 2000; I was out with my doctorate in 2012. During that time, which includes 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Great Recession, academic social democracy was reduced to tatters and rearguard actions. The ladder I climbed was broken into kindling. I don’t recognize it anymore.
The damage to society from higher-ed austerity is incalculable. It is a scar on the country, a terrible waste of gifts, a racist and classist crime. I survived something, insulated and cushy as my little existence mostly was. I’m humanities jetsam.
During high school my middle-class white family was able to send me to pre-college programs, like the Summer Enrichment Program at UVA, which changed my life by throwing me in with hundreds of other weird arty teenagers from around Virginia, including the far-off Northern suburbs, where they had a train into . . . well, the City, into DC, where there were coffee shops and bookstores.
It must have been midsummer 1996 when I was at SEP. One morning I left the dorm where kids from the program were housed and sat down at a picnic table in the quad. Someone had dropped a stapled packet of photocopies, which turned out to be a half-dozen stories by someone named Franz Kafka. There was a brief biography and critical appraisal in there too. Helpful.
You can imagine the rest.
I keep thinking about this now, at forty. Reading “The Hunger Artist” and “In the Penal Colony” at fourteen blew the top of my head clean off. It made everything I knew seem strange. It made me feel like this “everything” was totally insufficient but still part of something very important. Those photocopies that some hungover undergrad left behind changed my life’s course. Anyone who has encountered Kafka and loved him knows what I mean.
So many choices made by others, and so many accidents, make us. We control less than we like to think.
But then again this occurrence at nerd camp wasn’t truly an accident. No public university, no Kafka class, and nobody leaving their stuff for me to find while I was at a program designed by the same university to “enrich” middle-class boys and girls.
I’m the result of a matrix of forces, like anyone else. But over the past several decades the US ruling elite have poisoned and twisted that matrix, or matrices, such that fewer and fewer kids than even before have a shot at running into Franz Kafka on a summer morning. And that is a fucking tragedy.