In 1914 Walter Benjamin wrote a shrewd little treatise on the poverty of student life under capitalism. He argued that the university was nothing more than a factory of future workers, that student life is a frigid and soulless production line of dutiful young subjects eager to fit themselves into some idle part of the world and start making a dime for the man. He wrote ‘uncritical and spineless acquiescence…is an essential feature of student life’ and that ‘the perversion of the creative spirit into the vocational spirit, which we see at work everywhere, has taken possession of the universities as a whole and has isolated them from the nonofficial, creative life of the mind’.

And what the fuck does that have to do with the life of students at the University of Auckland in 2012 you ask? Well, I’m about to tell you. Benjamin was not only a genius, but he could have been a time lord. It’s as if he was able to stare into the future and describe the precise conditions we find right here and now. Although you would have to think that it is worse now, and if not worse then we have surely reached into the offal pit of stupid to smear our tiny minds with idiocy, because it sure as fuck isn’t any better. And who are we to go ignoring the warnings of a Nazi fighting time lord for generation after generation, only to end up with this cluster fuck we call an education? Whether it is worse or it is just as bad, the real tragedy is that most of you don’t have a clue what kind of emptiness you are buying into. Your experience here will naturalise all manner of mindless garbage. No doubt you already buy the nonsense about austerity or so-called ‘economic reality’, perhaps you think free education is ‘unrealistic’. After all you have already spent your entire life being shaped into good little consumers. You have your loyalty cards and frequent flyer miles, your favourite soft drink and your T-shirt with the ironic anti-consumer logo. You probably buy fair trade and feel a warm glow when you put your rubbish in the recycling. Or perhaps you are dosed to the eyeballs with unbridled cynicism, your life is too busy to worry about anything, you hardly have time to eat, and if it wasn’t for the convenience of drive through fast food you probably wouldn’t.

Well then, you will fit right in, as what you will get here is a fast food education. Processed mystery meat for the mind. You might think that sounds like hyperbole, but I’m not just talking figuratively. McDonald’s actually sponsors some of the courses here, so your happy meal education comes replete with golden arches note pads and helpful burger related examples. And guess what, that is just how our current government and the university administration want it to be. They think in numbers, just like a production line. They count you up like bags of frozen chicken wings, ready dusted for the deep fryer. The National government’s ideas (or rather lack of ideas) about education are abhorrent. They shamelessly fuse a program of simpleton economics and output to the insipid notion that the only education worth a jot is the kind that brings in loads of cash. A civic education, the humanities, the development of politics and a critical conscience, or for that matter anything that doesn’t deaden your senses to the banality of your world, is a waste of money, it’s not an ‘investment’ you see. If you can’t be an entrepreneur, then you are cannon fodder. If you can’t perform like a monkey for the market then you are probably one of those mindless arts students who thinks about crazy things like gender equality or social justice, or worse… you could be a fucking communist.

The biggest propaganda success of our time is the idea of austerity. All around the world the crimes of finance capital were investigated by putting the murderer in charge of the crime scene, and it is no different here. Forget the fact that 151 New Zealanders earned an extra $7 Billion last year while the rest of us saw the price of living rise and real wages stagnate, making us, guess what, that’s right… quantifiably poorer. Never mind that the average student debt is now around $30,000, or that you fees will rise around 20% in the time you are here. Who cares about the 250,000 children living in poverty, or the hundreds of families being evicted from their homes because the market says so? What does it matter that we have one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world, or that we have disgraceful rates of preventable diseases. We know what to do about that, let’s started shredding education funding and give the top 10% of earners in our country a tax cut of $2 Billion dollars. Seriously, what the fuck? Financialisation has poisoned our world with a dehumanising logic that has colonised the minds of people making decisions. It is not that free education is impossible, or that there is some kind of esoteric economic reality that ordinary people cannot grasp, the truth is this logic says education is a commodity and a source of profit. This is about the priorities of people that have a hand in guiding the structure of our world, not about some invisible hand that is linked to the almighty god of the market. All of these symptoms are a failure of the same reasoning that is increasingly dominant in our education system. We are not about solving anything through education; we are about making it impossible to think anything that cannot be measured by a balance sheet.

So where exactly do the ideas come from that get us into this mess? Who is it that thinks up all the plans? Well, let me give you a clue. A lot of them come from that eyesore over on Grafton road. The monolith of steel and glass that is so full of those neatly built pedagogues that dictate how you learn. The one with the exciting names like the Fisher and Paykel Auditorium and the ASB Careers centre. Hell, the place itself is named after a tax-dodging ex-pat who ‘donated’ money to buy a degree and some political influence. And what is it that goes on over at the business school? The valorisation of failure, that’s what. Stunted ideologues frothing up at empty signifiers like ‘growth’, ‘performance’ and ‘flexibility’. Contemporary commerce calls you a human resource without a hint of irony. From the bottom up you are considered to be a compartmentalised vessel, a portable plastic convenience for reading, writing and maths. You are a sequenced map of a person ready to be made into a paint-by-numbers individual, a walking resume with added value, or as you are known on paper, a unit of human capital. And if you don’t subscribe to that worldview then you are either unrealistic or stupid. The knowledge produced in that place is what legitimates the ideology of the market that has our leaders so transfixed in a mental haze.

I was over there last year for a prize giving when a man in a navy blue suit accosted me. You know the guy, he’s everywhere, he has that kind of fashion mullet haircut that was popular in the nineties, and he wears a baby blue gingham shirt and those chunky shoes that scream ‘I might be wearing a suit, but I could break into fun mode at any moment!’. Anyway, this guy sits next to me and introduces himself. He then tells me that he works in the ‘school’, and as if he is about to pull a card trick from his pocket, he produces a book with the title Postgraduate Prospectus, and then he says ‘these are some of our products’. ‘No shit? And I here I was thinking they were called courses and degrees, or were you referring to the pictures of the students on the cover?’ You see that is what they think education is. They have catchall monikers like entrepreneurial ecosystem and technology incubator, and they run crack institutes with names like Excelerator. They use words like ‘flexible’ and ‘dynamic’ and ‘adaptable’ to obscure the truth that you are nothing but disposable units, fragments of capital to keep grinding through the numbers. They have think tanks, as if a war on ideas is needed to compliment all the other wars against abstractions, and they have outreach programs to ‘cross-fertilise’ the work of engineering, science and medicine with ‘business concepts’. Make no mistake; these are the dominant ideas of our world. The economy, economic reality, consumer confidence, budgets, forecasts, and the white noise of the stock ticking fictions that solidify the tyranny of a marketplace worldview that has proven time and again to be a failure.

If we are to be honest then real ideas are not actually born in that place. An idea is that intersection between a fucked up piece of the world and the ability to change it. It is a truth that breaks down the oscillating logic of circulation and pointlessness. Ideas are not widgets and commodities, they are not for trade and they are certainly not property. Universities used to have real ideas, now they just have the market. If anything, business schools are where ideas go to die. They take what start out as ideas in other parts of the university and they emulsify them. Look at the university itself. Look around you; the public space is festooned with hoardings of advertising and inane branding. The common areas are infected with a common malaise. Students are atomised units of accumulation, knocking around in sense-deprived worlds of their own, anesthetised by the very education that is supposed to open their eyes. You all have to work shitty jobs to afford to live, you drink way too much because if you don’t you will be faced with the pervading sense that you are wasting your time. How ironic. The university is the point of exchange for inter-generational theft and the legitimating of a particular kind of cultural logic that has spectacularly failed. Here you may comment on anything you like, but you cannot change a thing.

And make no mistake, it is always getting worse. Funding is being well and truly cut here, but we are all frogs in a pot. The gas is lit, the water temperature is rising, and the gleeful little tory boys are giddy with anticipation. Look Bill, look Steve, look Johnny, the students have no idea… you see, if you put them straight in the boiling water, they will just jump out and make a mess. But if we boil them slowly they won’t notice, we can reduce their education to a watery mess and they will just swim around in it until they are truly fucked, boiled in their own stupidity like mindless little frogs. This is what Stephen Joyce means when he says ‘keep your heads down’, he means ‘get back in the water little froggie and take what’s coming to you quietly’.

Last year students protested all over the world. Thousands took to the streets in the UK and Ireland, even more protested in Spain and in Chile. Students were instrumental in the Middle East and they played an important part in the global Occupy movement. History has repeatedly shown us that students can drive social change. From Vienna in 1848, to May 68’ in Paris, from the People’s Park and Civil Rights to the Vietnam War protests, from Tahrir to Santiago, London and right here in Auckland. Students have stood up time and again to the inadequacy of an unimaginative status quo. And as our leaders set about selling our future to line their own pockets, and our own University continues to model itself as the soulless vehicle for the financialisation of everything, it is time we stood up and changed things before it is too late. Students in Aotearoa have been crucial to the success of social movements. Without student activism the anti-nuclear movement would have struggled, the Halt All Racist Tours campaign would not have happened and countless other movements would have fizzled. A radical student body can make things happen that otherwise would not.

The University is a symptom. It is a place where knowledge is considered to be property and ideas are kept locked up for when they can be rented out. Stephen Joyce, John Key, Stewart McCutcheon are silly old white men that know fuck all about your world. They come from a place that has failed you. They all had free education and a world of opportunity that they squandered and now they want you to pay to keep them in the manner they are accustomed to. There will be people in this University imagining all sorts of incredible things, but nothing sees the light of day unless it is worth money to the greedy trolls that run this racket. Education is not for betterment, it is not for public good or for the ‘unrealistic’ utopian fantasies of children, it is for profit, it is for cold hard cash. How else can you explain a world in which we can send people to the moon and make human organs out of plastic, but we can’t provide free education to everyone? How else can you explain a world in which Invercargill is a stand-alone model for everyone else?

The truth is you will spend the next few years here doing a half-arsed job regurgitating some half-baked ideas that you will soon forget, your education will turn you into a commodity so you can live out your alienated days in an office cubicle, gold-bricking ‘lolz’ on Facebook and paying back the ‘market’ rate on your disproportionate debt. While you are here you will totally overlook the fact that the university is a workplace with hundreds of underpaid and casual workers that clean the bins, tend the gardens and pick up the shit that you leave lying around. The academics that are teaching you will continue to turn out mediocrity in their peer reviewed journals and teach you dumbed down versions of worn out theories, or write books that nobody will ever read, especially not you. The accounting logic of targets and objectives, categorisations and compartmentalisation will fix you into a pattern that convinces you that reality might suck but there is nothing you can do about it. Even those of you who manage to get a ‘good job’ will mostly lead an empty existence. You might go on an OE to the UK where you won’t be able to get a job that pays more than 150 quid a week because the situation over there is worse. And while you are there you will be hunted relentlessly for your loan arrears until you have no choice but to pay back five times what you borrowed in order to complete a shitty degree that is all but worthless.

Or, perhaps you will finally wake up to the warnings of the doctor. Benjamin argues that the first step in overturning this situation is to understand what we are dealing with. He said, ‘Through understanding, everyone will succeed in liberating the future from its deformed existence in the womb of the present’. If we want to escape the world of perpetual crisis we live in then we need to wake the fuck up and do something about this place right here.

Henri Carlos