I am educator in the public college system. I got my start teaching at a Catholic commuter college that serves first-generation, working class students on the South Side of Chicago. From there, I went on to teach at the City Colleges of Chicago. It was in these spaces I honed my love for teaching. I currently work at a Hispanic serving, First-generation designated, commuter college in Denver, Colorado.

There’s an underlying assumption about the students who attend commuter schools and community colleges- that they are unworthy of educators who we might describe as “smart” or “brilliant” because they don’t perform intelligence in similar ways to students at elite schools. It’s assumed students in these institutions can’t attack the textual block in the same way, so therefore teaching them is not as rewarding.

I’ve been told in so many words that my talent is being “wasted” in commuter colleges because they require a high teaching load and the classes are filled with students who presumably aren’t “the elite of the elite.”

I’ve been told I should jump ship.

I have many problems with this underlying logic, but chief among them is that I personally wouldn’t describe myself as a “smart” or “brilliant” academic.

I’m simply a curious person whose willing to leverage classroom space for students to explore what they’re curious about in relation to specific topics. I thrive on putting students in the driver’s seat and supporting them in learning how to read, write, and research in ways that work for their minds and help them explore their passions and curiosities.

More to the point, academia is crumbling. Successive generations of high schoolers are not willing to take on the six-figure sticker shock for elitism anymore, let alone the sheer cost and time commitment it takes to even be eligible to apply to elite universities. As Fred Moten and Stephano Harvey put it, debt has become the nomenclature of the university, in more than just a literal monetary sense.

Knowing that academia is in shambles, I’m not inclined to believe it’s rescue or resurrection begins at the top of selective ivory towers, but at the “bottom”. If there is any chance of changing, transforming, or revolutionizing college education, it has to start with the institutions that serve the most students, not the institutions who pride themselves on selectivity.

Personally, I would rather loot elite libraries when the revolution pops off.

But, in the interest of avoiding prison or the rancor of fascist death squads, I’ll settle for arming the student proletariat with the skills to take Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feurbach seriously- namely that the point of philosophical education isn’t simply to interpret the world in a myriad of ways, but to change it.