Brian Orser, Chair of Pitzer College Student Senate

August 27, 2009
“In 1966 students at the University of Strausburg published On the Poverty of Student Life:

Once upon a time the university was respected; the student persists in the belief that he is lucky to be there. But he has arrived too late. The bygone excellence of bourgeois culture has vanished. A mechanically produced specialist is now the goal of the "educational system." A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking. Hence the decline of the universities and the automatic nullity of the student once he enters its portals. The university has become a society for the propagation of ignorance; "high culture" has taken on the rhythm of the production line. But all this hardly matters: the important thing is to go on listening respectfully. In time, if critical thinking is repressed with enough conscientiousness, the student will come to partake of the wafer of knowledge, the professor will tell him the final truths of the world. Till then--a menopause of the spirit. As a matter of course the future revolutionary society will condemn the doings of lecture theatre and faculty as mere noise--socially undesirable. The student is already a very bad joke.

Almost every book you will read over the next four years at this College is available in your public library. But you are here because, unlike the library, this College will officially recognize you for your thinking. And, unlike the library, this College is going to feed and house you. That is your privilege. Your existence at this College depends on the labor of hundreds in your immediate community, with numberless others toiling for your luxury. The student today sits near the top of a most unusual aristocracy.
Here we are. How should we use this privilege?

We are living in a conservative moment. There is a great deal of fear, and fear is the enemy of clarity, freedom and generosity. We live in a culture which values nothing more than a person's utility; in which a person's right to her life and its sustenance is based on her productivity.

Ours is a world which works perfectly. On the surface of this world, though, we have violently constructed a way of life which violates this perfection, and suppresses the infinite from which it springs; it is a system which allows the growth of vast concentrations of life, even as it denies the value of life itself, reducing it to so much hot and cold, edible flesh. The earth and its people have inborn the potential for life; but we will have to free ourselves.

It is possible that education be liberatory. It is also probable that education become a means for the reinvention and reinforcement of hierarchy, oppression, and unfreedom. If your education consists in a rote internalization of the existing hegemonic analysis of experience, then you are giving up your freedom so that you might more successfully strip away the freedom of others.

A critical pedagogy, on the other hand, teaches the process by which the thinker, or community of thinkers, constructs and reconstructs our collective categories of thought. A pedagogy which is liberating is a poetical one, calling upon us not to liberate ourselves from our experience of the world, but to to liberate our experience of the world from that which is antagonistic to its very living principle. The world is not to be hacked at, boiled down, cut open, and disintegrated until the seed of its virgin Truth is laid bare and bloody. The truth of the matter is in our communal experience of it. No matter how vigorously it is denied, we are here to discover something of the truth, and something of right and wrong. And we are here as a community of individuals to attempt the true and the right.

This College, then, is the space we must take to assert our selves and our community of needs, our imaginations of the potential of our peers to satisfy and heal us, our wildest fantasies of feeling whole and integrated. To honestly identify what we need, and then, in community with our fellow students, to discover how to provide it for ourselves – this is what need drive us forward. We have to stand in warm-blooded solidarity with each other as we learn to resist the pressures of the market, the oppressive inertia of the past, and the comforts of conformity.

Pitzer College was founded in 1963, as an academy on the fringes of the Academy. The brave vision of Pitzer College was of a community of adults, new and old, breaking down and reconstructing their concept of the world, preparing themselves everyday to break down and reconstruct their world itself. It is not enough to learn how the world is currently being discussed by those who made it what it is. That's merely of passing interest. Education can only liberate once it allows a fluid synthesis of the self, the world, and the ideal, this synthesis being the dynamic life of a healthy community.

Remember, what we attempt at this College is only human, all too human. There is something, when all is said and done, which can only be passed from warm hand to warm hand.”

Paul Waters-Smith, Vice Chair of Pitzer College

Student Senate August 27, 2009

“I’m happy to welcome you all to Pitzer College today.
I’d like to begin by exploring what brought all of you to study at this institution. We are all attracted by Sunny Southern California, a flexibility of study, and the promise of an intimate liberal-arts college experience.    But what sets apart Pitzer for many of us is its avowed commitment to Social Justice. On the Pitzer College website, in the ‘Why Pitzer?’ Section, the college boasts that students here are “Encouraged to ask how the knowledge gained here can be used to make the world a better place” and that the college provides “union of intellect with action”.
If we are intending to unite our intellect with our action, and ‘change the world’, then we might best first consider what is the relation of an elite College like ours to the world. Like any of our peer institutions, Pitzer is directly tied to structures of power and exploitation. The Endowment of a College – the mass of money all elite institutions jealously grow– is most certainly invested in the very industries many of us so vigorously oppose - though none of us are privy to in exactly which. Driven by the brutal demands of the market, these transnational corporations are raping the earth, devastating its forests and oceans, and exploiting its people in sweatshops and mines all around the world from Southeast Asia to Africa to right here in the Inland Valley. Meanwhile College and University endowments like ours form a major part of the accumulation of investment capital that fuels these ravages. Yet we hear only echoes of calls to pull our support from innumerable atrocities.
On a more concrete and personal level, the running of this college depends on the labor of many men and women who cook for and feed us, clean up after us, who built this campus, and who use their expertise to keep this place in working order. These people – who you will have ample opportunity to meet, though few students know many of them – are paid hardly enough to support their families, and are considered ‘at will’ employees, meaning unlike the rest of the college community, they have little security or power over their situation. There is much talk about ‘marginalize communities’ at Pitzer, but when it comes to action – like ceding some of the power we hold over those communities – that becomes a much more difficult thing.
The workers at the college are drawn from the surrounding area – an area too often ignored, called the Inland Valley. Far from barren sprawl, the Inland Valley is home to cities like Pomona that are culturally alive and historically coherent. But these cities have suffered greatly from reckless and uncoordinated expansion at the whims of the market, followed by the current pains of inevitable economic contraction. The incredible and often disastrous physical growth of the human settlements in this region is closely tied to the position of Inland Valley in Global Trade. The ports of L.A. and Long Beach are the points of entry for 40% of imports coming into the U.S., nearly all of Chinese and other Asian-manufactured goods. Most of these commodities are moved to a Sea of Warehouses in the Inland Valley, called the ‘Inland Port’, before being trucked to different areas across the continent. The struggles of harshly exploited construction and Warehouse Workers in this area demonstrate both the problems inherent in our economic system and a prime opportunity for a working class challenge to Global Capital. The inland valley is a place worthy not just of our study, but of our genuine engagement.
When it comes to the stated purpose of a college – Academics – Pitzer College is a very liberal place, one of the most liberal elite colleges in the country - ranked 7th most liberal by the Princeton review. This academic liberalism, however, does not often extend to questioning the premises upon which our society operates. In this way, Pitzer College, like nearly every other college and university, is committed to the reproduction of dominant governing ideologies, though they be slightly more enlightened ones. Thus, so many students studying the social sciences come to College hoping to gain knowledge in order to better ‘change the world’, but leave convinced that it can only be tweaked, and so many studying environmental science in hopes of defending the wondrous diversity of the natural world, leave – like their counterparts – to join the ranks of the government or non-profit bureaucracy, or even to the corporate hierarchies themselves.
Many of us are drawn to a place like Pitzer College in hopes of escaping the pressures of conformity and homogeneity present in society. Yet the experience of a Liberal-Arts college leaves us too often bare to the demands of respectability: so as to be accepted by our professors and administrators, never free from the normative expectations of our peers, we are constrained in our appearance and behavior, as well as our thought. Many of us yearn to be liberated from the commodification of ourselves, the regimentation of our dress, our speech, and our self-image by the industries that win profit by the appropriation, manufacture, and mass distribution of our culture. Yet, the liberal-arts college does not provide the environment for such an authentic liberation. An inherently social problem, combating conformity and mass culture is a necessarily collective project – the college a necessary space for that project to take place.

Recognizing such an unattractive reality, we are left with the question ‘what else could a college do?’. The apparent inevitability of this situation emerges from the college conceived of as a business, in which the competition in the market dictates how a college will act. Fortunately, the history of Pitzer College offers us suggestions of a different way, of a college as a community and not a business. Pitzer is a place where once college decisions were made by students and professors sitting in a circle in lively discussion. Pitzer is a place where students together built their own culture, experimenting with new ways of living their lives. Pitzer is a place where Professors taught critical consciousness as much as facts, and students engaged as not as passive receptacles of knowledge but as active and creative co-constructors of it. Pitzer is a place where students risked their prospects for social ‘success’ in order to challenge injustice, and laid the groundwork for life-long commitments to do so. These strains exist in Pitzer College – revived and combined with the new they present an image of a community many of us might dream to join. Our inheritance from this Pitzer tradition allows the students, together with faculty, to chart the course of the college by making policy in the remarkably progressive College Governance Structures. Unlike other Colleges, our power is already established – we need just to wield it.
President Trombley often says that after Fourty-Six Years, Pitzer College is coming of age. The Question that is ours to face is: ‘what age Pitzer is coming into?’ Is Pitzer going to fulfill its youthful dreams, of critical and innovative intellectual engagement, a space for the flourishing of our vibrant eccentricities, a College with its central drive social consciousness and its primary goal social change? Or is Pitzer College simply to be a less stuffy alternative to Pomona?    This future of Pitzer College, like its history, should be directed by the energies of its students – our role in determining the future of this institution is indispensible.
If we as a community strive towards a ‘union of intellect with action’, then we must learn to act on these problems, and begin to live a different reality. As Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, Spokesman for the Zapatista peoples in Southeast Mexico, said “Dignity cannot be studied, you live it or it dies”.”