Elitism cultivated in a university environment is dangerous.
Let me be clear: I have a great respect for higher learning and believe the degree to which universities shape the world shouldn’t be underestimated. But this acknowledgement only causes my anxiety to increase when I consider the democratic elitism I have observed here at Wright State.
I certainly don’t feel nostalgia for a time the ability to attend college was itself an elite privilege, but even so I fear a common model for universities in which a multitude of special interest cliques lobby for money, attention, etc. without any holistic purpose to justify why one’s goals should be perpetuated over another’s.
Sound familiar? It should. Contemporary American politics argue more over who should decide what to do rather than over actually deciding what should be done. To some degree, it is healthy to consider who exactly is making decisions or having influence, in any environment; however, when the fragmentation of a university reaches a level in which even chemists and biologists argue over which group should receive grant money for a similar research, there is something wrong.
And it is that people are feeling elite simply because their opportunities encourage them to.
Why don’t the chemists and biologists work together more? If they aren’t serving themselves, why don’t they work together to understand how a certain medication might affect the body? The example I’ve used is generalized and perhaps banal, but the problem exists nonetheless.
To return to my original statement, the danger of this kind of division in a university produces an elitism that appears justified to one’s own self. It appears so because in having an intense focus on one’s ideas to make professional headway despite slim opportunities, one is easily deceived into feeling elite the more they have success.
But this self-deception subverts what I feel a university is founded upon: constant learning and re-evaluation though different perspectives. The more elitism takes root in a university’s culture, the less will that university yield fruit edible to the rest of the world.
