Commodities as Students, Commodities as Workers
Kristoffer Martin
Undergraduate/English
Too often we find ourselves vexed by the impetuous insincerity that we share as a conglomeration of cultures and of peoples. In the U.S. the attitude of commodity no longer only applies to the products being bought and sold on the stock market, in the grocery store, and on the internet, but also of people. Numbers fill my head thinking about it, nearly 3.5 million homeless, nearly the same amount unemployed. We buy and trade the lives of people, their well being, their health, their children, and their parents. In a word people are no longer people, we are cattle. Driven to work for people willing to treat us as cattle, only to be turned around and shot when our usefulness is no longer viable.
At the university level, as many students have experienced, we are treated in the same way. No longer do universities see students as prospective community leaders, businessmen, or career seeking individuals worthy of being educated; no, sadly, we too have become a commodity to the university. State or private, we are all a large cash cow to them. Avowed to some virtual control of our futures, of the monies we pour into the school, millions each year. Meanwhile professors are cut, class sizes doubled, workloads overextended, and tuitions hiked. If a student disagrees with a professor they are hurtled through a maze of bureaucracy only to not see any change and often to be accused themselves of misconduct. Oh but it’s an education, no? Readying you for the future? Yet only 20 percent of students to graduate this year nationwide will find jobs.
Those who do find jobs, not in their field, will be treated the same as they were in college, as fodder, a commodity; and this will be the case because if you don’t want to work there, there are half a dozen other people, in your same situation, trying to pay off bills and student loans, who would love to have your job. When people argue that college does not prepare students for the real world, in some senses this is correct, in others, those people could not be further from the truth.
And what about that conglomeration of cultures, is not college meant to be the place to exchange freely one’s ideas, thoughts, and art? Not any longer. Universities marginalize students, molding them into the majority culture rather than exchanging cultures. Novelty is a rarity, languished by some, heartily cast aside by most who just want to pass the class and get to the next subject. Of course a liberal arts school does not help the matter, requiring X amount of general credits, often in subjects students do poorly in, or suffer through for the sake of receiving its credit value. Why, stated under the guise of being “well rounded” and having experience in many areas, the truth is greed.
Yes greed, the more students are marginalized the more money the university makes, the fewer professors on staff needing to be paid, the more money is put towards bonuses for the administrators. Students lose out, professors become overworked, remain underpaid, and neither walk away from the school year capable of supporting themselves, either financially or mentally.
And we wonder why the society at large complains about the state of education. Public schools are abysmal, losing more money each year and expected to maintain or even better the students’ test results. These students are already cynics, despising education by the time they leave high school. What are high school diplomas worth today anyway? A job flipping burgers at McDonalds, getting a minimum wage managerial position at Kohl’s or Wal-Mart and working your way up until you make fifty grand a year, wooo. It is almost the same with a bachelor’s degree.
We are stuffed, fattened up by television ads, and social stigmas, we sit on our asses bouncing to the cues of popular culture hanging on every word that Oprah spits out, that the Jerry Springer “guests” yell and scream; we are the buttered up rump roasts being stripped of our humanity, our vox populi as we sit and drool at the television, at the radio, read the nuances of our history with disregard. Slumping through the days drinking and sleeping and complaining without one instance of self recognition of fault and retribution; as our banks fall, as our economy crumbles, as children starve to death on the streets or are beaten and murdered, raped and battered. We think “what is good on tonight?” or “I wonder if I’ll get sloshed tonight,” and all the while we become more and more the commodities easily traded away and forgotten.
Moreover, in this mess, those of us who have voices, who want to be heard, are not. We are the black sheep of the herd readied for market. We say change, we say do not run for the fence, think about what will happen, and we are pushed aside by the unrestrained unintelligent garble of everyone’s two cents. Maybe that is the problem, the people who do have something to say, have a reason to be heard, cannot be heard, because the status quo sits on top of everyone and makes it impossible to get past it. Is not the very nature of a glass ceiling at all levels of status a crunching deterrent or are we determined to smash through it by changing that status quo? As students and as citizens, it is our job to stop the progress of “commodification” of people. We must enable ourselves for the future and we need to step away from the prim rhetoric that debilitates us as a society. No more religious candor, no more corporate hegemony, no more stereotypes, no more bigotry, if we are to advance and become a better, unified, and stable community, these things must be rid of. Our progress is hindered every day under the guise of tradition, under the mask of propriety, and through the voices of old form, decadent, past beliefs that are only perpetuated by honorless greed.
Stop being the puppets, start thinking for yourselves, and stop the stupidity.
If we are to be anything else but commodities to those who have power, we must stop ourselves from becoming commodities. We have to demand our right to live, demand our right to work a decent job in our respective fields, and we have to demand that corporations stop their incisive dilution of funds. This has to start here at the university level, and it must continue into our future lives.