withholding our brilliance as a form of protest
Today has me thinking a lot about what it means to belong to an institution of higher learning. I am thinking of the Columbia students being arrested and suspended from their university for protesting the genocide in Gaza. Some students were told they had 15 minutes to collect their belongings from their dormitories and were then evicted from their housing. It is hopefully clear to many now that academia upholds and enforces colonialism, the status quo, and the interests of the white supremicist billionaire class.
I think one of the most meaningful demonstrations of protest we could witness in the face of such fascism would be for all these bright and promising students to drop out of these institutions in protest. Imagine what was once an extremely competitive university sitting empty because all the brilliance drained out of it and those with a conscience objected. Imagine these students re-enrolling at a more ethical institution (if such can be argued to exist), or even better, creating their own spaces of autonomous learning.
Institutions are not where knowledge, wisdom, learning, and innovation reside; people, especially collectively, are the ones who hold these things. The beauty of this is that we can take these things with us anywhere we wish to go. We can boycott institutions that uphold the systems that would destroy us and we can take back our collective self-sovereignty, owning our knowledge and forming our own classrooms and lecture halls wherever we'd like.
This concept goes hand in hand with the open source philosophy. Hoarding and paywalling knowledge doesn't benefit anyone; it harms all of us when knowledge is not democratically distributed and openly available to all who seek it.
Spaces of decolonized and DIY learning already exist: look at places like the School for the Ecocene, courses like Cultivating Regenerative Livelihoods or the hands-on superadobe building workshops you can take at Cal Earth. Examples abound in communities and localities all over the world. The less value we place on traditional higher education and institutional symbols of achievement, the more we can focus on learning, teaching, and cross-pollinating ideas with people from all sectors of society and across cultures, languages, and geographical distances.
I invite you to imagine a world where we take back our agency, pool our substantive, rich, and diverse common resources, and design and engineer a world that works for everyone.