Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb. Friends, on this episode with Eli Meyerhoff,

we address the radical proposition that academia is beyond reform and that education isn't a self-evident

good. No, I know that this flies in the face of plenty of political perspectives and certainly

the valorization of schools, teachers, and going to university

in general. That's a valorization which constantly pits the so-called educated against the so-called

uneducated and that binds us to a sense of worth that is, of course, only attainable by

getting a certification from an accredited institution, which is

a tangle of corporate and state structures and interests. As someone who's gone to plenty of

institutions of higher education, too many, and also who has taught at them, as well as engaged

in and offered alternative modes of learning,

I think about this kind of thing all the time, which is why I had to have Eli Meyerhoff on the show.

Eli is researching at the Social Movement's Lab and works as an organizer and is the author

Beyond Education, Radical Studying for Another World, which is an

excoriating look at how academia has always exploited people and maybe past the point of mere

reform. I'm sure you've had your own experiences of shit in school. The last time I tried to go to school, I was pursuing an anthropology PhD here in Ireland,

which was just a revelatory disaster on all fronts.

It started with, let's see, the phony promise that the department was interested in guiding people into non-academic careers

because it kept emphasizing, well, you're not going to be able to become an anthropology professor, so you have to do other things.

But then when I said, okay, great, I'm established outside of academia and I don't want to be an academic, they had no way to deal with it.

They didn't know how to wrap

their heads around it, and it was just sucked for everybody. It also took the form of professors

just not being able to understand the things that I said or wanted to research because

...