Beatified Boards And Civic Cults

In the title of his social history of public education, Carl L.Bankston III  refers to public education as "America's Civil Religion".

I haven't read the book, though I plan on doing so.  However, his title got me to thinking.

More than a few commentators, including people who are, were or never were members of graduate students or faculty members, refer to academia as a "cult".  They say that, in essence, the academic world is bound mainly by a set of beliefs.  The least pernicious of them are mere snobbery; worse ones inflict real damage on people and are used to evade accountability.

In other words, schools, school boards, colleges and university systems make themselves seem sacrosanct and use that status to gain whatever their most avaricious and esurient leaders want.

If you find the right lawyer, you can call practically anything a "religious organization" or "religious institution" to gain tax-exempt status.  The same lawyer could probably figure out a way to turn your club into a "non-profit educational organization" or some such thing.

Religious and educational organizations also can use their status to paint anyone who questions their methods, let alone their motivations, as philistines, heathens, heretics, subversives or out-and-out criminals.  

If you want to know how a "pastor" can afford a BMW and take a winter vacation in the Caribbean and a summer vacation in Europe or Asia every year, you are challenging, well, God.    

Similarly, if you say that you are against a new tax to pay for increases to the local school budget or oppose a university's plan to raze a neighborhood so that it can build new dorms with rock-climbing walls and state-of-the-art culinary and entertainment systems in every room--or if you say that some graduate program or "professional" school should be closed down--it simply must mean that you want to impede research and the development of young minds, and really want the China, India or Russia to take America's "rightful" place as the world's leader.

And, if you ever decide that instead of taking a vow of poverty--whether for the church, "education" or the "academic world"--you want to take a remunerative position or write a book or create a product that might have some commercial appeal, you are accused of giving into Mammon (i.e., "selling out").  

If you oppose the greed of religious or education administrators, question the value of a program that brings in a large grant or tax exemption, or simply decide that developing a personality disorder isn't for you, excommunication of one sort or another could follow.  So could attempts to defame you or derail whatever course you've decided to follow instead.  And, if you were living on, or for, the approval of your church's prelate, your graduate advisor, your department head or your provost, the process of withdrawal can be painful, at least for a time.

The good news is that most people who leave cults--whether they are shrouded in clerical robes or academic gowns--ultimately find their own inner worth and manage to fashion interesting and (in various ways) meaningful and rewarding lives and careers.  Things are difficult for a time, but in the long run they find their way.  And they usually end up with better wardrobes.