University of Virginia Library

WASP Elite

The University of Virginia was
founded at a time when education
was the key to success; when it was
the exclusive prerogative of an aristocratic
class which used it to maintain
their prestige, authority, and
material well-being (i.e. "Knowledge
is Power"). For that reason,
blacks, women, and other low
status groups had to be excluded
from the University; for to give
them admittance would be to grant
them a share of the power held by a
culturally/ideologically homogeneous
WASP elite; and the last
thing any group in power has ever
wanted to do has been to share that
power. Their fundamental ethic was
Expansion: economic expansion at
home, imperial expansion abroad,
and ideological expansion within
the mind (i.e. the use of public
education and the mass media as a
form of melting "pot" which would
submerge and fuse all minds within
a monolithic theology of the Protestant
Ethic, Puritan Morality, and
the White Man's Burden). Education
allowed them to ride the crests
of these waves of expansion; to
exploit and enjoy the power,
wealth, and psychic self-satisfaction
generated by that expansion. Education
was functional - a means of
gaining and maintaining Power
("Study, Work, Get Ahead, Kill!").

Today, however, these waves of
expansion are being turned inward
as Marshall McLuban has suggested.
Such a high level of material wellbeing
has been attained in America
that farther participation in the
economic "rat race" seems futile,
sterile, self defeating (i.e. time and
energy can be used for more rewarding
activities - this presupposes
an inevitable redistribution
of wealth in expanded social
services and a guaranteed annual
income). The growing strength and
self consciousness of the nonwhite
"third world" has made imperial
expansion either impossible or prohibitively costly
in terms of military
effort, economic strain, and internal
divisiveness (as the Viet Nam
war has demonstrated; incidentally,
the same negative or counter-productive
phenomena have occurred in
the Soviet Union after the invasion
of Czechoslovakia). The spreading
influence of bureaucratically controlled
education and commercially
dominated mass media have had an
unanticipated impact on the public
mind: they have trained it to be
highly sensitive, alert, and critical
while simultaneously exposing it to
the most glaring flaws in and faults
of our society (i.e. televised riots or
combat scenes; journalistic coverage
of radical personalities, organizations,
and ideas which otherwise
would have languished in obscurity).
Because of these facts, the
"success" ethic is now increasingly
seen as meaningless; it no longer
works; it is irrelevant to modern
life. People now begin to demand
an education not because it will
lead to power and "success" but
because it is seen as a necessary part
of the "good life," of self fulfillment.
Education is no longer a tool
in the hands of a power elite; it is a
continuous process of self realization,
in which all groups want to
participate.

The power elite is losing its hold
upon the minds and actions of the
American people for the reasons
listed above. To the extent that is
subconsciously realizes this, it has
been making concessions to those
groups it had previously oppressed:
thus we now have civil rights laws,
token racial/sexual integration in
many institutions, and a climate of
fear and tension (dramatized by the
Wallace movement and the Chicago
police riot) which always accompanies
the collapse of one
WELTANSCHAUUNG and the
growth of another. These changes
will continue and the University is
being, and will be increasingly, affected
by them. Racial/sexual integration,
student/faculty power,
curricula reform, and other radical
changes are not only desirable but
inevitable as our social/cultural environment
continues to change at
an accelerating rate. The problem is
not whether these changes will occur
- but when. Will the University
begin instituting them now, sensibly
adjusting to changing conditions;
or will it repress, stymie, and
sublimate radical efforts so that
they eventually explode in a destructive
way? The University, as it
is presently constituted, is doomed
(!) - it will either creatively evolve,
reluctantly submit, or be violently
forced to accept a new role; a role
as a leader of society and a community
of educated individuals
rather than as an institute for training
and replacing specialized cogs at
the upper levels of the American
welfare/warfare machine (our now
obsolete and rapidly crumbling
WEHRMACHT).