Compliments of TEDxJAX*
Greetings from sunny Saint Augustine, where I’ve been since midday Wednesday. I’ve spent most of that time working, but it’s still a beautiful change of scenery. Just being here feels so good. It’s so lovely to have someplace that’s home, even if it’s just something to miss most of the time.
Despite the comfort and beauty of arriving home, this week has been a bit of a shitshow — after Odin recovered from his sickness, my own version bloomed. Less bathroom time, more facial tissues; either way, inconvenient, since I’d already taken a sick day Monday after having not slept for 48 hours and was scheduled to be out of the office working remotely the last two days of the week. All told, I ended up spending only one day in the office last week, which doesn’t make me feel awesome… but these things happen.
Although I’ve been doing bottle shots of Robitussin, I have had a good time here. Yesterday, I got medicated enough to attend the TED simulcast in Jacksonville at Sun-Ray Cinema, which is already one of my favorite places to be in the world. The segment we got to glimpse was called “Nightmare,” in keeping with the overarching “Dream” theme of the talks this year in Vancouver. Topics breached: gun violence, race, global warming. All the speakers were, of course, fantastic. I happened to be sitting next to a couple who are apparently big-shots in Jacksonville, because literally everyone was coming up to give them handshakes during the half hour before the show, while I sat there reading a GQ article on my phone. Oh, well. At least it was a really good one.
My favorite part of the talks was the sort of halftime show they do, a musical performance, this time by a band I’d never heard of called the Carolina Chocolate Drops. They were phenomenal. The lead singer, Rhiannon Giddens, just radiates power, strength, and pride, and her vocals will floor you.
Also she was wearing a fierce full-length gown, and after she jumped up and down with her tambourine during their final number, I thought, there’s no way she’s wearing heels under that. Sure enough, when the host called her back up to congratulate her, she walked out holding the dress up — and I was right.
Barefoot on the TED stage. What a fucking boss.
(Not the best sound/video quality, but this was my favorite number they did and her voice carries even on a shitty cell phone recording like this one.)
So, yes, I had a lovely time — but it also made me reflect a bit more on my decision to leave graduate school (which was further instigated by that pesky “memories” feature Facebook’s rolled out, which recently dredged up the photo I took a year ago of the map of America I’d been sharpie-ing my escape plan onto between classes).
I guess I thought grad school — and academia at large — was going to be what TED is. People gathering together to talk about important ideas that can actually change things. That’s what college could be.
Instead, it’s a chaotic circus of ego, insecurity, and barriers to entry. A boy’s club that’s hard to see as such until you’re sitting there, ready to graduate, and the drab uniformity — and flimsiness — of the robes reveals itself as more than just a metaphor.
I’m so in love with learning, with the idea of smart people gathering around tables to have significant discussions. But even though it’s so much easier to find that — or some approximation of that — in academia, the learning part, I’ve found, is about 10 times realer and more significant when found in the wild.
Not to say TED’s perfect — hell, a ticket to attend costs a more-than-prohibitive $8,500, which complicates my bucket list desire to attend someday significantly.
And I’ve certainly had my share of really fantastic, genuine experiences within the confines of the ivory tower. I keep in touch with many of the people involved in those to this day.
But in general, the academic system is failing us, and not only in its content. Old news, but still important: students graduate so deeply in debt, they might be paying it off well into their 40s. Art and music still take a back seat to high-earning STEM degrees, and lots of those positions are filled by candidates who didn’t get a degree at all. Not that I think that’s a problem — I think the myth that a college education is an essential a key to success is the problem. And its price tag, and the monetary-goal-oriented, assembly-line nature of degree programs, which become stifling instead of expanding. Who needs some expanding more than the 18-year-olds we pressure to take on this underwhelming and costly experience — and to know exactly what they want to do with the next 50 years of their lives by the time they’re 21?
All this to say nothing of the fact that the monetary goal promised is most likely out of reach. At least TED’s content is 100% free once it’s released — without some “but you don’t get the piece of paper that says you really learned stuff unless you pay” caveat. At least TED still cares about art and design and music. At least TED is interested in finding ways to translate great ideas into real human change. It’s so much more than hopeful-looking, upward-trending correlation lines… although I will admit, there were quite a few of those in the 2-hour segment I saw. Probably to counteract the fact that each of those speakers signed up to talk about dreams and then got drafted into nightmares.
Anyway. I’m really happy and lucky to have gotten the education I did, which was fulfilling, broadening, and surely useless by any pragmatic benchmark. I got it for free, thanks to the completely arbitrary fact that I was born into a high-income family. I pretty much lucked into a fantastic career and am, in large part and more solidly than ever before in my life, happy.
I just wish there were a way to make that trajectory more possible for everybody.
* Photo from when I attended the TEDxJacksonville conference in 2013 and watched a string quartet from Jacksonville University perform.