Ivory Tower Page #4

---

Teachers can't do sh*t.

Families can't do sh*t.

I do think

families and teachers can do sh*t.

Every time that I come in here and I say,

"What do you guys think about this?

"Do you want to change

these assignments?

"How do you like these readings?"

I'm trying to give you

opportunities for agency,

so that I'm not just simply

treating you as any old students.

The purpose of this place is for you

to create what you want here, right?

And the problem is

that for you to get what you want,

you've got to cooperate

with other people,

which means trying to figure out a

way to communicate your anger

without being antagonistic.

Two and a half hours of Hegel.

Take a half hour break,

another hour and a half of Lacan.

Absolutely. Yeah, I'm happy to.

Even as

Deep Springs seems

to become more and more obsolete

or more and more

of some kind of idyllic fancy,

there's something there,

and everybody feels it,

having been through it.

This school stands for something.

Because of America's status

as a country that's always reaching for

higher and higher ambition and growth,

in the 19th century,

we started to have this idea

that a university education could be

of benefit to absolutely everyone,

that we should be able to all

have the learning that we need

to have self-respect,

to be able to support ourselves,

and also to be able to be full citizens.

That idea really culminated

in the Morrill Act in the 1860s.

In the middle of

the Civil War, in 1862,

Congress of the United States,

amazingly enough, found focus and

attention to pass the Morrill Act,

which funded the {and grant colleges

that later became

the great state universities.

The federal

government provided

for the expansion

of this dream of higher education

at an unprecedented scale.

This had never happened before

in any human society

that we'd have institutions

of higher learning coast-to-coast,

and it wouldn't just be for the nobility.

Senator Merrill believed in

education even for the sons of slaves,

creating, post-Reconstruction,

the historically

black colleges and universities.

Institutions arose at a time

when we had racial segregation

and we had gender segregation

to ensure that black Americans

and female Americans

could get a higher education.

Spelman College

was founded less than 20 years

after the end of slavery

with the idea of creating

educational opportunity

for women who had had none.

It's a place where

a young woman can say,

"This place was built for me."

I am a testimony.

Every Spelman student

is a testimony.

A testimony of prayers during slavery.

Slavery.

They themselves had been denied...

Denied.

- ...education.

- Education.

As it had been prophesied.

Prophesied!

One of the major

things I think you get from

being a young black student

at a historically black college is that

you get to have those conversations

about race and about gender,

how the two fit together

and then how that affects

What you're thinking, how you're feeling.

When you're in a place for four years

where there's people

who look like you, and they're achieving,

it does do something

for your own confidence.

So it's really a space

where you can grow as a person.

I went to The Winsor School in Boston,

and it's predominantly white.

Coming from a minority experience

to a majority experience,

I think it forces me

to find an identity other than the obvious.

At my high school, you know,

"Who's Amirah?" "She's the black girl."

Here I have to really figure it out.

There are so many other

intelligent black women here.

College, being

a place of mental growth,

simultaneously can be

a place of spiritual growth,

because the two really go hand-in-hand.

Glory!

My sense of self is stronger,

and it's really helped cultivate who I am.

God's a-gonna trouble the water

So wade in the water

Children

I do think you can get that

experience without going to college.

You can travel the world

and get that experience.

You can merely migrate from your

hometown and get that experience.

But college is a place

where that all comes together in one.

Historically black colleges

are very powerful.

They have a strong connection

between the students, the alumni,

and the other

fellow historically black colleges.

But for me, in particular,

I didn't apply to many HBCUs.

I've been around

black people my entire life.

I went to a school that was more than,

like, 90% African-American.

I didn't know how

to interact with white people,

and I was afraid.

The biggest thing, I think, that I've been

able to pick up while being at Harvard

is the ability to connect with people

from all different walks of life.

I don't want to just

impact my community.

I wanna be able

to impact the larger community.

All of these institutions

have made immense contributions

to the history of our democracy.

And if you cannot have a democracy

without an educated citizenry,

you want to see

as many citizens as possible

get as much education as possible.

The philanthropists of the Gilded Age

gave us the idea of

mass higher education

as a basic human right.

Peter Cooper was

this industrialist who believed in

education as free as water and air.

He founded The Cooper Union,

a school of industrial arts

and design in New York City,

with the idea

that it would be available to people,

no matter what their background,

to study useful and practical arts.

But today The Cooper Union

is one of the last examples of

a free higher education institution

in the country.

A full scholarship

for every enrolled student

is the current mission statement

of Cooper Union.

Peter Cooper wanted the school

to be accessible to the working class,

to women, to people of color.

I come from a lower-middle class family.

My parents told me about Cooper.

And when I found out, like I...

I was like obsessed.

I didn't even think

about going anywhere else.

Nowadays, so much is against

this 19th-century model

of a free education.

Ideologically, financially it's ancient.

When Jamshed Bharucha,

the current president, came into office,

he announced to

the Cooper community that

we are running a large deficit

and that tuition for the first time

in 154 years would be on the table.

Free tuition, it's our mission!

The current administration

is trying to say that

education as a right is not something

that we should be focusing on.

Being free, the financial

model is extremely complicated.

You look at the financial

statements and you can see.

An extraordinarily large deficit.

I think Peter Cooper

would have wanted us,

if we had to talk about tuition,

to be able to talk about it.

We all acknowledge

that we're in a financial strait right now,

but the administration

and the board fail to understand

how tuition's going to destroy the school.

President Bharucha's

come from tuition-charging colleges,

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes