Tag Archives: Arizona

Notes from the Four Corners

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Desert 6.JPG“I cannot hate them, the tourists, because I am one.” -Nabil Kashyap, The Obvious Earth

They say that when you first encounter the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, it can be disappointing for two reasons. First, it is situated in a relatively small room that is always packed with visitors, so many that you have to shove to reach the painting, and second, even if you make it to the Mona Lisa, the painting itself is small and unsurprising. You already know what the Mona Lisa looks like. You can buy a poster of it in the gift shop. Instead, it’s the art in the hallway outside the Mona Lisa room, the unfamous work you’ve never seen before, that leaves an impression. The Four Corners Monument is similar.

Two days before the country celebrates its independence, I drive through the desert to Colorado, and make a stop at the Four Corners, between Navajo and Ute Mountain land. I drive slowly over the dirt road, following cars and followed by campers. I find a parking space and step out of the air conditioning into the heat. It is exceptionally hot, barely a cloud in the sky. I’m used to this. I’ve almost missed the heat, living in northern Idaho for so long.

Desert 7

The Four Corners Monument is a square of shaded stands around the circular marker itself, directly where the four state borders meet at 90 degree angles, distinguishing jurisdictions and electoral districts from one another. When I enter the square, I’m confused about which state I’m in, but it becomes clear when I see the four stone markers around the circle indicating each respective state, like cardinal directions. There is a long line of people in front of the circle, each tourist standing in summer wear and waiting to stand in the circle to have their picture taken straddling as many US states as one can.

I don’t get in line because it’s hot and I’m on my way to meet a friend I haven’t seen since I visited Albuquerque in winter, and I impulsively don’t want to be a tourist. I grew up in a tourist town, as a local. It’s a habit I can’t shake off, wanting to distinguish myself from them. I’m not any different from the tourists, though, not here. I walk the square of shops in the shade, passing people eating fry bread from paper plates, passing locals selling jewelry, knives, Kokopelli decorations.

In Portland this spring, I saw Nabil Kashyap give a talk about the colonial nature of travel writing, the fraught history of the travelogue. Historically, the genre frames the traveler as a hero and the place visited as a backdrop for the hero’s self-discovery, transforming locals into objects, props. Kashyap’s own collection of travelogues wrestles with this history. In his panel, he advocated for a more ethical form of travel writing that “decenters the visitor” and emphasizes the place, the people, without claiming ownership over the stories that are intrinsic to the place and people. This time last year, a lot of people noted that Anthony Bourdain was an exemplar of this kind of travelogue, taking the role of a reporter, letting people tell their stories on their own terms.

Desert 2At the edge of the square, there is a sign telling visitors not to spread ashes of the deceased here because the scattering of human remains on this land goes against Navajo custom. I wonder how many tourists scattered their dead relatives at the Four Corners before the locals had to put up the sign. Despite the signs, tourists still come to the Four Corners and spread cremated relatives on this special dot on a map. I think about how weird it is to celebrate the alignment of state borders here in the Southwest. 150 years ago, this was Brigham Young’s Mormon territory called Deseret. 160 years ago, this was Mexico. 250 years ago, this was Spain. 450 years ago, this was Pueblo land. Statehood was only granted to Arizona in 1912. The land may appear static, but its cartographic meaning is always changing.

Instead of standing on the corners, I wander out to the trailhead up the hill from the square, but only a little ways. I’m not equipped for a hike in the desert at noon. I look out at the windswept emptiness of one state or another, this stateless terrain. I’m the only one who walks this way, and I’m glad to be out of the crowd. Later, I use the bathroom. I buy some fry bread. I take some photos. I leave with my fingers sticky with powdered sugar, wishing I could hike around this place in cooler weather, see what else it has to offer.

-jk

 

The Phoenix Oligarchs

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Phoenix Democrats campaigning for Goldwater in 1958.

Phoenix Democrats campaigning for Goldwater in 1958 (Shermer 166).

“Lookouts perched high above the red butte looming to the side of the town spotted the caravan of government vehicles flowing out of the Kaibab Forest like a lava stream. . . As planned, they lit a stick of dynamite and sent it up and over the town, alerting those below that the raid had begun, and to be ready.” -Martha Sonntag Bradley, 2011.

“The two great forces pulling Arizona are California and Texas.” John Gunther, 1947

On July 26, 1953, the town of Short Creek, Arizona, witnessed a scene from an old west movie: The law came to clean up the town. The predominantly Fundamentalist-Latter Day Saint community may have seen it as the inverse, though, as corrupt outlaws leading a kidnapping raid on an innocent, God-fearing frontier town.

Martha Sonntag Bradley describes the Short Creek Raid as a dramatic episode, writing that when Mohave County Sheriff Fred Porter “climbed out of his police car, the first to enter town, he was greeted by the group’s religious leader, Leroy Johnson” who confronted the Sheriff by telling him “that they had run for the last time and would stand and shed their blood if need be” (12).

The raid was part of a crusade from governor John Howard Pyle and Arizona’s new GOP to make the state welcoming to post-war businesses by “cleaning up” its national image. In 1951, only a year in office, Pyle hired a private investigative firm from Los Angeles, the Burns Detective Agency, to investigate the conditions in Short Creek. By 1953, the Burns agency provided enough evidence for Pyle to order 102 officers to take all but six Short Creek residents into custody, including 263 children. On that day, he justified his actions on radio, saying the state “now has substantially concluded a momentous police action against insurrection within its own borders” and that police “arrested almost the entire population of a community dedicated to the production of white slaves” (Bradley 6).

The raid played out like a confusion of tropes, the culmination of Arizona’s changing political landscape. A few years earlier, a host of new political elites in Phoenix began a campaign to rapidly rebrand the state from a lawless frontier wilderness to a polished, suburban business-friendly sunbelt state.

Up to this point, many Arizonans had supported Pyle’s reforms, but the images that emerged from the raid of police officers separating children from their families on purely religious grounds horrified people enough to vote Pyle out of office two years later. Pyle’s reforms were seen as an overreach, but should be seen as the extension of a larger political trend based in the state’s capital.

Pyle came from a coalition of Phoenix-based business elites who had recently swept into several civic offices in 1949 (100 years after the polygamist Brigham Young claimed the Southwest as the independent Mormon state of Deseret). They all ran together on a pro-business platform, intending to run Phoenix essentially the way they ran their own enterprises.

They called themselves the Charter Government Committee, or CGC. Its fist members included local department store owner Barry Goldwater, a lawyer and college fraternity mate of Goldwater’s named Charles Walters, Phoenix mayor and disaffected Democrat Nicholas Udall (a former businessman from the Udall family), Hohen Foster (who owned a bottling company), Margaret Kober (active in local charities and married to a prominent Phoenician doctor), Frank Murphy (who worked in life insurance), and Harry Rosenzwieg, a childhood friend of Goldwater’s whose family owned a string of jewelry stores. They also had support from Eugene Pulliam, who owned the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette, and openly used his newspapers to support the CGC.

United by shared financial interests, these eight Phoenicians met a divided opposition. Arizona had long been run by Jeffersonian-style Democrats, but the state’s labor movement had gravitated to the party in support of FDR’s New Deal. At the turn of the century, the Industrial Workers of the World had been instrumental in organizing miners’ unions in Arizona’s copper towns like Jerome and Bisbee. However, Arizona’s labor movement was consistently hampered by the state’s conservative Democratic leadership who were disinterested in workers’ rights.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer notes that “Labor movements in the West flourished in the 1940s” (682), and pinpoints union-busting as the first battleground for the emerging proto-New Right in Phoenix. In 1946, the business leaders who would later form the CGC first campaigned for a statewide right-to-work initiative, which passed as a result of their aggressive, close-knit efforts. During this time, Goldwater drew on his own history of editorials railing against the New Deal throughout the 1930s, and it was his reputation as a capitalist public figure that “helped create a network of anti-regulatory, anti-labor Phoenicians” (686). Shermer notes elsewhere that many conservative Democrats began endorsing CGC candidates, seeing in Goldwater a return to Jeffersonian tendencies, leaving the party’s labor leaders even more isolated (Sunbelt Capitalism 166).

Goldwater and his compatriots were not satisfied with a right-to-work initiative alone. They wanted to sell Phoenix, and to Goldwater, “selling Phoenix also meant creating the proper community environment” (Goldberg 71). To that end, he “lobbied Arizona legislators to send the right message by cracking down on gambling” (72), as well as prostitution. The goal was to change Phoenix from a saloon into a department store.

In 1952, the CGC went on to win the governor’s office. Pyle actually hired Goldwater to run his campaign, and Goldwater literally flew the candidate across the state to meet voters in rural and Native American communities, a contrast to Goldwater’s later indifference to Native interests when he discussed selling indigenous land for uranium mining.

Pyle’s attempt to end “polygamist insurrection” was the next logical step of the CGC’s plan to sell Phoenix as a safe investment. Pyle’s mistake was to implement this plan in the loudest way possible, parading the end of the lawless frontier out to the public. His law-and-order style authority was a bad branding move: Phoenix needed to look like it had always been owned and operated by modern upper-class nuclear families, like it had never been a liability for stakeholders.

But Pyle being booted from office made no difference. The CGC managed to run Phoenix like a committee of shareholders, concentrating the state’s power to the capital and making that power as friendly to privatization as possible. What began as a city council election became the creation of an almost unstoppable political machine that ran the city for the next two and a half decades.

Bradley, Martha Sonntag. “A Repeat of History: A Comparison of the Short Creek and Eldorado Raids on the FLDS.” Modern Polygamy in the United States ed. Cardell K. Jacobson and Lara Burton, Oxford University Press, 2011.

Goldberg, Robert Alan. Barry Goldwater. Yale University Press, 1995.

Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy. “Origins of a Conservative: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimation of Organized Labor.” The Journal of American History 95.3 (2008), pp. 678-709.

Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy. Sunbelt Capitalism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

 

Writing in the Rain

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Rio de FlagI may not be jumping around like Gene Kelly in the rain (writing while dancing is ill-advised, and I would know, because I’ve lost four laptops that way). But I do like writing when it rains.

Growing up, I usually had plenty of free time during summer and Arizona’s monsoon season. In college, I took summer classes during the rainy months, and spent a lot of time indoors next to a window, writing. I associate rain with writing, and I enjoy desert rainstorms. The temperature drops, and the moisture makes everything smell more vibrant, the pine trees and shrubs and soil. Even an overcast sky makes me want to write, even if what I end up writing is terrible.

It’s safe to stay inside when it rains. Overcast skies mean lightning. In the Midwest, rain can sometimes mean tornadoes and flooding, and in Arizona the monsoons always accompany flash flooding, to the point that Arizona even passed a so-called Stupid Motorist Law, which requires drivers who enter flooded areas to pay for the cost of being rescued. I can’t write about rain like it’s a benevolent god when the opposite is equally true. Rain can destroy. But having grown up in a state that, in a few years, will have no water at all has made me appreciate the rain in all its destructive beauty. Noah had the better apocalypse. Drought is not the end I would choose, but it’s what I’ve been dealt.

Rain also feels safer to me, somehow. A swollen, grey-haired overcast sky stretching from horizon to horizon feels like a second roof over the roof over my head. I can hide behind rain curtains, like I’m waiting to go on stage and give a speech or monologue or stand-up routine. It precipitates anticipation, motivates me to prepare for something, but I never find out what. So I prepare by writing, and after the clouds dissipate, I wait for it to rain again.

-jk

From Coffee Shops to Mountaintops

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Macy's

For a too-short time this summer, I’m on a pilgrimage to my hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona. Here, I’ve been working on a collection of short stories that will become my Master’s Thesis in less than a year (no pressure), because I won’t have much time to write come Fall when I’ll take four graduate classes, teach two classes, hold office hours, and try to get published. Flagstaff is a nice place to be productive. It’s also a nice place to be useless.

This month, I’ve been scurrying from one Flagstaff coffee shop (many in gentrified neighborhoods, admittedly) to the next. Maybe sitting all day in Macy’s or Firecreek or Steep (technically a tea house) is a bit of a yuppee activity, but for many writers it’s an easy solution. Coffee shops induce productivity with comfortable spaces, lots of light, energetic music, and socially acceptable drugs like caffeine. They remove us from crammed apartments, English departments, and work places; they spark quiet, collective inspiration. I’ve also enjoyed the aggressively supportive environments that seem to define the West, where even complete strangers encourage you to keep going and pursue your dreams, even if they’re strange and uncomfortable. My writing has been very productive.

But there was another pilgrimage I needed. Yesterday, after writing and reading stories in Firecreek all morning, I took the afternoon to hike up Mount Elden. I did not take anything to write with, and although I’m a strong advocate for making art in the wilderness (alone or with friends), I wanted a more complete silence. I wanted the overwhelming smell of bark and dust and dew. When I return to Nebraska, I’ll have to find the same solitude in the prairies, out on the range.

Mountaintop

From the mountainside where I stopped to rest, the only thing I could hear were crickets and the distant whistle of a train. There was no traffic; there was no music; sometimes a bird chirped, or a deer fluttered through the forest below the steep cliff’s edge. I was not alone, but I was alone from people, and from myself.

It was windy, almost cold, but closer to the sun I felt warm. It was peaceful to be nobody for a while, to be free of the need to be someone. The pressure to be someone these days, the millennial fixation with making something of oneself, being a successful talented individual with a totally unique, self-owned identity, is sometimes too much.

Sometimes I’d rather sit on a mountaintop and be useless. No fast pace. No updates. No news. No one to impress. Just one more organism in an ecosystem finding, at last, its place therein: a lone and unimportant creature in a society of deer, coyote, foxes, crows, ponderosa, a cityscape of boulders and greenery.

-jk

To Vote From Afar

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ForeverA while ago, I mailed forms to my home state of Arizona requesting an absentee ballet for the upcoming primary and Presidential elections. I sent a little letter into a sea of mail, and now I wait earnestly for my approved absentee ballet.

It’s Arizona, though, so there’s a statistical likelihood that my vote won’t make a difference. Each election I’ve voted in, my vote failed to put into office my preferred candidate (a ham sandwich named Marty who wears a hop hat and monocle running as a Neo-Whig Anarchist, obviously). Because the Whigs (and every other party I would realistically vote for) don’t stand much of a chance in Arizona (unless more people voted), I will once again have the honor of not making a difference in 2016.

It’s possible, however unlikely, that voting will make a political difference, but that’s not necessarily why I vote. I vote to be part of a community, to participate in an almost religious experience, to be part of something bigger than I am, a kind of highly-organized mob mentality centering around mostly rich, unconcerned smiling people in suits I couldn’t afford with my life’s savings. It’s enchanting to be part of a communion that has the potential to involve so many. I’m sad how often we collectively waste that potential.

In the 1952 election in India, 105,944,495 people voted. It was the first election after Independence, the first with universal suffrage, and although it constituted only 45% of the electorate, it was a colossal success considering that India’s literacy rate was only 18% in 1951, and is even more impressive given the vast number of languages spoken by India’s electorate: as of 2001, only 22 of India’s 844 languages and dialects were officially used for constitutional purposes. India’s first election involved all levels of society in a nation stratified by centuries of colonialism and damaged by Partition with East and West Pakistan, and nevertheless one hundred million people turned out to vote. Despite the militaristic turmoil around Partition, people turned out to explore an (admittedly western-designed and implemented) experiment in voting.

The upcoming U.S. Presidential election is quite different from India’s 1952 election, but I want to be a part of the masses. In a strange way, becoming a statistic feels transcendental to me, like I’ve moved into a part of history that exists outside all indicators of the self, outside personality, documentation, religion, class, race, and into a cloud of participatory revelry, into a quantifiable oneness. I wish I could vote in person, but from my temporary home in Nebraska, I will still move beyond myself. And maybe, just maybe, Marty the ham sandwich will finally usher in four years of Neo-Whig Anarchism.

-jk

Cited: Wendy Singer. Independent India. Edinburgh: Pearson Education, 2012. Print.

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My Last Letter to Flagstaff

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Dear Flagstaff,

autumn forest

There’s no easy way to say this, but I have to say goodbye.

Northern Arizona University

It’s not that I don’t like you. On the contrary, you’re the finest community I’ll ever know. Never mind that you’re the only community I’ve ever known. Having lived in Flagstaff for twenty years and with no actual memories of my life in Pocatello, Idaho, before moving to you, it might be unfair to future communities, but I mean it, Flagstaff. Where else can I see a herd of deer pass in front of my car just uphill from my high school? Where else can I have a mountain for a backyard? Where else will I be an hour from the Grand Canyon and Sedona?

Flagstaff

You’ve been great to me, Flagstaff, but it would be naive to say it was all fountains of chocolate. I mean, you are in Arizona, after all. The snow was nice, but driving downhill on an icy road to a stop light was a little scary. I appreciated the dog food factory, but the smell was a little overwhelming sometimes.

Macy's

Everything good and bad that has ever happened to me, with a few exceptions (Ireland, Montana, Minneapolis), has happened to me in Flagstaff: failed orchestra concerts, a broken arm, publication, falling in love for the first time, crippling self-doubt, hangovers in church, learning to play the violin, becoming an Eagle Scout, rejections from journals, writing my first good poem, writing my first bad poem, saying goodbye at the train station to the woman I loved. I’ve had colds and stage fright, I’ve had frog dissections and marching band performances, I’ve had reader’s theater and photography gigs. I lurched through high school and college in Flagstaff. Spending two decades in a place allows for the accumulation of immeasurable joy and bitterness, and leaving you, Flagstaff, is a tough decision, perhaps the toughest I’ll ever have to make. Sticking around is quite tempting.

Train Station Bench

But I need to see other cities, other states, other countries. I need to travel. I need to study and write and learn. I’ll start by going to graduate school in Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln may be the opposite of you, Flagstaff, but everything is packed, and I’ll be out the door by the time you read this. After graduate school, I’ll traverse shores yet untarnished by my footprints.

Duck Pond

Even if I fall for Lincoln, I’ll always miss you, Flagstaff. You were the rough draft of a misshapen side character dropped into the world; you were a place of enlightenment in the saints’ cult of writers; you were the architect of this backpack stuffed with art and questions that I am honored to call my soul.

Christmas in Flagstaff

I owe you more than I’ve given, and you’ve given me more than I deserve, Flagstaff. Perhaps I’ll come back to you someday. I would like to see you at least once more before I die. If I do make it back, I hope you have not changed except to become more beautiful, but I cannot, for the life of me, imagine a more beautiful city.

Pipeline Trail

I’ll miss the hippies and cowboys and geriatric motorcyclists. I’ll miss the perpetual smell of pine trees and incense and dog food. My memories of Flagstaff are like photographs in a gallery hung at random. No real structure binds these moments, and it’s more breathtaking that way. With that, I say goodbye Flagstaff. Wish me luck.

Appalachia

Sincerely,

jk

Midwest by Northeast

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The Map

For someone who grew up safe in the Southwest, the idea of the Midwest is just a scary story, no more real than werewolves or zombies or werezombies. But soon, all the stories may be proven true. I may wake up one day no longer a Southwesterner but a Midwesterner.

We’ve all heard tales of the Midwest. We’ve seen them in movies like A Christmas Story, Field of Dreams, even children’s movies like Fargo. We’ve heard Garrison Keillor’s weekly horror stories about allegedly growing up in the Midwest. I myself didn’t believe the stories, but soon I’ll immerse myself in the region, in the cornfields and endless piles of Lutherans.

I’ll have to disguise myself to fit in. I’m already quiet, so maybe they won’t recognize that I’m an Arizonan. I’ll have to start eating German and Scandinavian food instead of Mexican. But will I really become one of them? One of those smiling, dry-humor-loving, flat-land-roaming, hotdish-cooking huskers? I’m a fully-fledged American Westerner. My ancestors traversed the Rocky Mountains, settled in the potato fields of Idaho and the great Bitterroot Valley. I have family scattered across Arizona, Utah, Idaho, California, Oregon, Washington, and Montana. Will I transmute into a Midwesterner? Or will I be like the lone survivor of a zombie apocalypse, wandering the fields among the throngs of polka-dancing tundra folk?

I’m sure I’ll end up enjoying life in the Midwest, even if resistance is futile and I start eating hotdish and corn. Or I’ll discover that the Midwest and Southwest aren’t that different, and I’ll fit in just fine, because as important as regional identity is, we should dismantle every wall we allow it to build between us. We’re all in this sinking ship together, after all, and life’s too short to let our differences confine us.

In any case, I’ve lived in Arizona for twenty years: Arizona is a dystopian oligarchy whose capital city, which is a violation of basic human rights by its very existence, is run by a deranged sheriff, and about thirty percent of the population qualifies as a heavily armed militia that wants to improve upon the concept of walls with barbed wire and snipers. If I can survive in Arizona, I can survive anywhere.

-jk

Ghosts of the West in Jerome’s Public History

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Jerome Jerome, Arizona, is one of the oddest, most colorful towns in the state. Its history is rich, and its public history is thriving. Now a major tourist destination, as well as a small artists’ community, one can see Arizona history, and indeed U.S. history, in every corner. At a wine tasting one can see a passing motorcycle gang maneuver up the narrow streets, while a ghost tour marches downhill toward one of Jerome’s many historic sties. Jerome is itself a museum, an exercise in public history, but it is caught along the fault lines that make public history a contentious endeavor.

ruins

Ruins of a primary school.

Many go to Jerome to see the Old West as John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, John Ford, and others portrayed it. By the time How the West Was Won debuted in 1963, the Jerome Historical Society, founded a decade earlier, was already busying itself purchasing saloons, churches, mining equipment, and other property to advertize Jerome as a ghost town. Today, the Jerome Historical Society tends to dominate public history, and their goal from the beginning was to draw a crowd. Popularizing the town’s title, ghosts are now a prevalent motif. One can go on a ghost tour, visit a haunted hotel, then eat lunch at a ghost-themed restaurant. The Wild West narrative appears in the ruins of Jerome’s schools, jails, brothels, and saloons, and a past rife with outlaws, sheriffs, and western debauchery in a lawless city where anybody can make it big with the swing of a pickaxe.

The Cuban Queen

Entrance to an abandoned brothel, The Cuban Queen.

Jerome is haunted by this history, but by other histories as well. History is contentious, often snagged between fragmented political agendas. Today, several state legislatures want to change AP U.S. History curriculum to emphasize American Exceptionalism, a word that makes most historians cringe. Jerome may not be as fraught with politics, but the ghosts that haunt it are more than the usual characters in a typical western.

 

BenchThere is Charley Hong, who emigrated from China in 1880, two years before the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. He became a wealthy businessman, owner of the popular Bon Ton Restaurant (later the English Kitchen). Though a local celebrity in Jerome, the xenophobic climate in the west persisted, to the point that his restaurant was bombed in 1909. Miners haunt the town as well. Making it rich by mining may sound appealing, but the work was arduous, usually deadly, and compensation was minimal. To make matters worse, in 1917 corporate managers rounded up miners suspected of affiliating with workers’ rights organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), forced them onto cattle trains, and deported them out of town. Meanwhile, the local hospital witnessed approximately 9,000 deaths.

Ruins of a prison

Ruins of a prison

It is impossible to fully capture the diversity of Jerome’s history, and here I fail to do it justice. Public history, however, is an important venue for historical inquiry. The ghosts that haunt Jerome are more than just a handful of quirky characters. Jerome is haunted by the miners, the migrants, the unnamed lawbreakers, the women who worked in the town under challenging and dangerous conditions, the indigenous communities in the area. Jerome is indeed haunted, but most of its ghosts remain unheard. I intend to conduct more research, because for me history is about listening past the vast silence of time to let the old voices speak, and Jerome is shaking with eager voices.

Jerome Landscape

 

 

 

 

 

Once Upon a Time, Graduation Meant Something

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Empty It finally happened. I graduated. I shook hands with the Dean of Arts and Letters and some of my favorite literature professors, and was handed a fancy diploma case for after the real one arrives in the mail. I went through the whole ritual, but when I left the Skydome amidst Flagstaff’s annual early-May snowstorm, I felt about as empty as the diploma case they gave me.

Most of my friends and family expect graduation to be a time of great joy, relief, sadness, and memory. I reflected on many things, but I tend to be reflective in general. For me, graduation offered no profundity. It was a mess of finding the right place, shaking the right hands, and enduring vague speeches about the future. Walking onto stage, having my name (and other information) announced, and receiving a diploma case should have been meaningful experiences, but I couldn’t keep myself from thinking that it was all a show.

Commencement was a self-congratulatory performance for the university, and the profiteering involved in the current education system was not only evident but ever-present. All students were required to have a cap and gown to participate in commencement, and the only way to obtain them, short of cheating and borrowing them from a friend, is to purchase them from a company; I was among those who cheated. After receiving an empty diploma case, students were ushered into two photo shoots. I was literally pulled into position, but I cannot get any of the photos taken unless I spend more money to purchase them. The commencement speeches had nothing to do with any of our own problems, our crippling student debts, an unnavigable job market, a scary world with an even scarier future. Instead, the speeches were about the university’s accomplishments, its growth and benefits, all at our expense.

College is no longer about advancing art and science and law; it’s become a business for the corporations benefiting from the on-campus dining, the corporations who make and sell caps and gowns, the construction companies profiting on new buildings the school can’t afford without cutting valuable tutoring and learning initiative programs. Education is one of the most important assets of the modern world, but the education system has become a method of exploitation.

All through commencement, I felt exploited. That’s not to suggest I did not receive an adequate education. Indeed, my professors exceeded my expectations, and they’ve changed me immeasurably. But college, as a system, profits regardless of anybody’s intellectual, scientific, artistic, political, technical, or social improvement. Instead, it encourages us to bankrupt ourselves so it can grow. In the end, NAU’s leaders do not care whether or not I graduate; they care about getting my money, and that realization hurts. I’m fortunate to have worked with professors who sincerely value their students’ collective improvement, to the point that they run themselves into the ground physically and emotionally by the end of each semester just to help us. But NAU, and the modern college-industrial complex, has done little, if anything, to contribute to its students’ intellectual improvements. I owe nothing to my university, but I do not blame it. This is a national pattern, and all of us are caught up in it. How long will it last? How long can it last before students realize that they are on a conveyer belt for the profit of private firms with no investment in literature, law, environmental science, political science, understanding globalization, or the development of compassion?

And now I’m going to pursue a graduate degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Now I’m plunging myself back into the factory.

Am I wrong about all this? Is it not the case that my friends have been placed on a conveyer belt for the past four years? For the next fifteen? Will the education system ever be returned to the hands of the educators and not the businesses? In a perfect world, the students gain more from a four-year program than the university they attend; we’ll never make it to a perfect world, but I think we deserve more than we’ve been given. We are more than crops with full pockets to harvest from. We are more than fruit to be drained and dried. We are scared, we are angry, we are curious, and we seek understanding. We are passionate and seek the means to express. We are knowledgeable and seek to use our knowledge. We deserve to be treated honestly about what we’ve been given, what we can do, and where we are going. Although I’m disappointed in my graduation, my university, and my country for voting the universities into such positions, I’m far from disheartened. Behind the curtain and the profiteering are professors who still work hard to teach and improve us. It is because of these professors that I have the means to express my discontent, and it is only through these means that I see any possibility for change.

-jk