A Degree of Animosity

I go to school, I write exams
If I pass, if I fail, if I drop out does any one give a damn?
And if they do, they'll soon forget,
'cause it won't take much for me to show my life ain't over yet...
---The Barenaked Ladies, "What A Good Boy"


I am a university dropout.
That looks rather incriminating, stated baldly like that, doesn't it?
I have nothing to say in my defense. Well, I have plenty to say, but it's doubtful any of it would make much sense to a jury of my degree-holding peers, much less acquit me of the crime of willful stupidity.
But I'll say it all anyway, pointless babblage being something of a trademark of mine.
I guess the first thing I should say is that I'm not a typical dropout. I didn't major in beer and coeds. In my entire postsecondary career I got drunk all of once, and as for the co-eds, feel free to laugh now. (Okay, not that hard.)
So if I didn't embrace booze , nor a floozie's bosoms, what could have compelled an Ontario Scholar to abandon his studies and not look back? Gather round, and I shall tell.

My first mistake set in motion a train that would eventually jump the rails and spit me screaming from its smoking wreck. In my OAC year I decided to pursue a degree in English. And why not? I loved to read. I loved to write. I aced nearly every high school writing assignment without effort. The secret to my success was simple, and lo these many years later, I've simplified it even further: I treated every essay, short or long, as a blog entry. Like this blog, my English assignments were written "on the fly" and handed in that way. My style was anything but academic, but I guess I managed to get my point across, because my ego was rubbed into a fine sheen by the time I graduated high school.

It was maybe three weeks into my time at Wilfrid Laurier when somebody first asked me what I planned to do with my degree in English. Believe it or not, I was at a loss for words: the idea that one does something with a degree simply had not occurred to me. A degree was school. Work would come afterward, whatever it was.
"...I'm not sure yet," I temporized.
"Well, I guess you'll be a teacher, right?"
The thought filled me with dread. It hadn't been that long since I'd been a keen observer of many teachers, and more to the point, many students; no way would I choose to trudge down that path.
"Umm, no, I don't think so. I just, uh, don't know."
Pretty articulate for a wordsmith there, Kenny-me-boy.

That scene played itself out over and over throughout my first two years. With increasing alarm I began to realize that teaching was widely viewed as the only possible reason somebody would choose to take Honours English Language and Literature, fittingly abbreviated H.E.L.L. My mulish nature asserted itself in response. You watch, it said, I'll do something else with that piece of paper, and the world will sit up and take notice. Just what that would be, I still had no idea. But the future would take care of itself, right? It always had.

My imagined future was unravelling around me, and I was blissfully unaware of the fact. I had discovered the Internet, and taken to it like a slacker to a couch. Entire days went by in a hazy blur. My classes were unattended, largely forgotten, in the interactive rush. Far from feeling guilty about my truancy, I defended it; to some degree I still can!

"University teaches critical thinking".

Yeah, right.

Here's the dirty truth you're not supposed to discover about university, or at least about my program at my school as it existed when I was floundering in it; a conversation I had today suggests things haven't changed much. Far from being a liberating experience, most classes are intellectual prisons ruled over by arrogant wardens with delusions of divinity. Your own thoughts and ideas rate less than zero: after all, when have you ever been published?
Well, I had news for those Caesars: I was being published daily, hourly, even, and my ideas were being analyzed all over the freakin' world, man. Flame or flattery, it mattered not. This was what I was paying thousands of dollars for: exposure to unlimited opinion as a way of refining my own opinions.
I suppose I could have switched majors. But my experiences with electives were illuminating, and what they revealed wasn't pretty.
The same demand to swallow opinion and regurgitate it as fact held in other spheres, I found, but even worse was the method of teaching prevalent in many of my elective classes, to wit: the prof would read the textbook to you. Verbatim. Well, fuck a duck, I remember thinking. I can do this in the comfort of my own dorm room. Or better yet, in that computer lab...
Geography 101. I swear to God, the first lesson went like this: Okay, class. This is a globe. [points to line running around the middle of it] Does anyone know what this line is?
Welcome to Grade Four, folks!
Psychology was a lot better, because I found the material intrinsically interesting. But I'd read the textbook in one sitting and then die of boredom for the next six weeks while we pored over it in class, line by line. Eventually I'd just stop going, and three guesses where I'd go instead.

Just today I was talking with one of the cashiers at work, who currently finds herself taking a degree in H.E.L.L. Her greeting today was "Damn, I hate Doctor ----!"
The very name caused a wave of hot bile to course up my throat. Jesus, that troglodyte's still there?
"Do you, now? What'd he do to you?"
"He said my thesis was wrong! And gave me a D!"
Whereupon someone next to her perked up. "How can a thesis be wrong?"
How, indeed?
The EXACT same thing happened to me fifteen years ago. I was every bit as furious then as she is now. Of course, she probably won't be accused of plotting to kill the man, as I was.

You read that right. Shortly after my run-in with Doctor ----, Laurier Campus Security knocked on my door in MacDonald House and demanded I accompany them to their office. It seems somebody with a real hate on for the dear professor had snail-mailed him an expletive-filled rant replete with threats of death or worse. He seized on me as Prime Suspect because, I guess, I had had the nerve to dispute his mark on my essay, and question his method at arriving at that mark. That would, of course, be the essay with the "wrong" thesis. As an aside, Doctor ----
noted that I always submitted my essays, including that one, with little poems appended. That was obvious proof I was deranged, see?
For five and a half hours the Laurier rent-a-cops grilled me, doing everything short of torturing a confession out of me. Was it not true that I hated Doctor ----? "Hate's a strong word", I said. "I certainly don't like the man."
I went over and over the confrontation with Doctor ----, with every tiny variation on my story relentlessly probed. Every once in a while one of them would suddenly blurt out "you want ---- killed, don't you?"
"No! There isn't anybody on this earth I want killed. You've got the wrong guy." And on and on and on.
"Please let me see this letter", I asked. They refused.
"Well, let me write something. You can compare the writing."
That wouldn't work, either, they patiently explained. I could just as easily have disguised my writing, or gotten someone else to write the thing.
My mind chittered around like a rat in a cage.
"Where was this postmarked?"
They really didn't like me asking the questions. Probably doubled as professors in their spare time, I thought.
"Hamilton", came the grudging answer.
Holy shit. "I was in Hamilton last weekend", I blurted out. "With my girlfriend. She goes to Humber. Call her. Ask her!"
My ill-thought-out admission of being at the scene of the crime probably added about 90 minutes to my interrogation. I was ordered to sit back and relax and the litany of questions resumed. Relax, yeah. I'll get right on that.
"Would you say you swear a lot?"
You mean, like, right now, you fucking asswipe douchebag shit-for-brains? "No. I'm an English major. My vocabulary was assessed at college level in fifth grade. I don't resort to profanity very often."
"Because this letter's quite explicit."
"I imagine it is." What was I supposed to say?
"Doctor ---- says you write poetry on your essays. Why do you do that?"
Huh? That was from so far out in left field I couldn't even give it a frame of reference.
"Why do you write poems at the end of your essays? What do they mean? Nobody else does that."
Ah, yes, the endless quest for "meaning". I'm wearily familiar with this from all those English classes. Because no author could have ever written something for the money, or just because it sounded good. No, there's got to be layers upon layers of soul-choking meaning.
"Why do I write poems at the end of my essays? To distinguish my essays from all the others. To make them memorable. I summarize everything in my essay in the form of a poem. I do it in every class--ask around. I even did it in high school." They loved it in high school, I thought but did not add.
"So you want to be remembered, eh? Do you want to be remembered as the guy who killed that asshole ----?"
I think it was at that point that the candle of my university education guttered and died.

Eventually Laurier Campus Security was evidently convinced of my innocence, because they let me go. Maybe it was me telling them I was the son of a police officer and understood very well the consequences of uttering death threats. Of course, they never admitted as much: instead they told me they'd be keeping a very close eye on me.
Well, now I could skip Dr. ----'s class and have a damned good reason for doing so.

That professor's still playing his little games. How the hell can a thesis be wrong, particularly concerning something as dated as Old English? It's not as if it's a cutting-edge field, after all, with new theories advanced every month. Criticize my writing, sure; critique my thought process, but don't write on the front page of my essay that you "don't need to read any further".

Back in high school, a great teacher named Cliff "Stoneface" Martin dared to give me a C-minus on an essay. Ask my friend Jen, who was there: I wigged out. It was the lowest mark I'd ever received on an essay, by far, and after a lifetime of A's and A-plus-es I felt entitled to them. I embarrassed myself in front of my classmates that day, but Stoneface just sat there stone-faced, and when I ran out of breath, he asked me to see him after school.
I went to see him, still in a state of high piss-off, and he deconstructed my essay in front of me and revealed to me how shabby it really was. He said a lot of things to me, and I've remembered every one of them.

Look at this progression, Ken. You're assuming too much of your reader. Your job is to prove your thesis, that's all it is, but here you're acting as if you've already proven it, and you're on page two.
You tossed off this paragraph without thinking about it, didn't you? It lends nothing to your essay.
Such big words! Do you know Orwell's Rules for Writers? Rule Two is 'never use a long word where a short one will do.' "
[I thought to myself: Rule Six is 'Break any of these rules sooner than say something outright barbarous'...but then again, I really could have done better, couldn't I have?]
Really, Ken, you could have done much better. You're a very good writer when you try.
"But that's just it, Mr. Martin. I don't really try. I just write."
"No, Ken. You try. You just try faster, that's all. Oh, you don't have to try to get words out, unlike many people in this class. But EVERY writer tries to get the right words out. Or at least, they should."
I left for home that day humbled and exalted. A couple of years later, I found myself thinking Mr. Martin never said my thesis was "wrong".

So now I find myself without the fabled "credentials", a word my sociology professor adored. And I still can't bring myself to care. Tuition fees go ever higher, and reports from people currently attending university invariably mention that thorough notes for nearly every class are readily available online. So what's the point of going to class? I ask them.
"To be with your friends".
"But wouldn't you rather be with your friends somewhere else?"
"..."
Corrupting the youth of Canada, I am.


In this Wiki-world, everything I could ever yearn to know is a few clicks away. Best of all, I'm free to sort out opinions for myself and make up my own mind how to think. No, wait a minute. The real best thing of all is, I can do it for the price of an Internet connection.
I'll take my career lumps: I earned every one of them. A university degree would net me untold thousands more dollars in my life, assuming I could find a field I could stomach and then find a job in that field. Yeah, a degree would be great...if I valued my life in dollars. Luckily for me and everyone around me, I don't...