Timothy Quinn

The Hyperselectionist University

I've often wondered, in the years since being kicked out of the film department of a reputable Canadian university, whether I owe my curtailed experience of post-secondary education to bad judgment or human error, whether somewhere there's a Bernardo Bertolucci or John Ford spooning change from bus station vending machines because his or her high school grades, unlike mine, aspired to the healthier side of moribund. I had the privilege of attending first the University of Toronto, and then York University, which, to be fair, is a particularly good school if you're partial to waiting in line for an opportunity to speak with someone in your faculty whose office bookshelves bear evidence of a passing fling with hermaphro-Marxist imagery in the lesser films of Truffaut, and which has in recent years installed an enclosed shopping arcade to broaden the number of venues in which a student may expect to wait for startlingly uninformed service. I had left the University of Toronto after a year with the notion that the only fields worthy of study were the hard sciences and trades, and ended up in film production believing I'd achieved an acceptable compromise between the reductionist methodologies of a technical education and the unstructured egocentrism of a fine arts degree. What I discovered, in the several months it took to once again become disenchanted with the idea of claiming an undergraduate degree, was that somewhere along the line - a promotion here, a peer review there - the process of post-secondary education had abandoned the ideal of the mature well-rounded student in favour of a narrow-minded brow-beaten creature intellectually tailored for a career in freelance telephone solicitation. Just as a nation or organization may restructure itself with the death of a leading statesman, the world of arts academia had somehow acclimated itself to the death of Critical Thought.

There is a popular notion among professional educators that the study of analysis by non-logicians is a fair substitute for analysis itself, a notion buttressed by the First Law of Academic Hindsight which states that all original thought, all innovation, all art, occurred within an historical context from which the object of study was somehow obligated to emerge a priori. Consequently, a vast majority of university-level students - many of whom will graduate this year without basic reading, writing and comprehension skills, let alone the ability to structure a formal argument - are exposed to the paradigm-shattering revolutions of Copernicus, Darwin, Beckett, Picasso and Pound, without the faintest clue as to what constitutes paradigm or how one might interpret data based on specious reasoning. All too often, it seems, academic "analysis" borrows from the social sciences for statistical or morphological proofs with which to deconstruct the work of artists and other non-linear thinkers:

  What happened with Chico and Groucho above 
  (and thus resulted in humor) was that Chico 
  responded to Groucho's initial question by 
  making it sound as if Groucho had been asked 
  and was expected to answer. Groucho then 
  went along with this switch, reviewing details 
  of the question he had put to Chico as if he 
  Groucho must answer it. More switches and 
  role breaks follow on throughout the entire 
  discourse event.1

Consequently, what undergraduate students invariably glean from the work of their betters (and thus, I suspect, results in humour) is a repertoire of trite unrelated observations into the unquantifiable processes of "genius." Ever-increasing degrees of academic specialization ensure that cross-departmental relevance is marginalized and meaningful communication between disparate fields becomes even further imperiled, resulting in a generation of art students who don't understand basic environmental science, and physical science students who can't comprehend the value of poetry.

A division would appear to exist in academia between quantum, or ontological, and statistical knowledge, with the former invariably subjugated to the latter as unquantifiable and thus outside the realm of analysis: the etic deposed, even in the arts, by the all-powerful emic. The university, by its very nature, is an emic construct, reliant on statistical proof at all levels to reaffirm its position in society, despite the absurdity of Bell Curving and the indomitable GPA: what, in fact, could be more bizarre than the statistical representation of a student's learning, applied intelligence and potential for growth in an innocuous-looking decimal which can, it would appear, be conveniently manipulated according to the laws of mathematics? In such bright reductionist environs, what need remains for the analytic tools of critical thought?

History is often presented as a discontinuous dialogue between diametrically opposed viewpoints, and the history of evolutionary theory is no different; Charles Darwin is commonly portrayed as an iconoclastic idealist standing alone against the fundamentalist doctrine of the Christian church and the prevalent anthropocentrism of 19th century European intelligentsia. In fact, Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin's and independent proponent of the process of natural selection, held somewhat more stringent views on evolutionary theory. As representative of a faction of "hyperselectionist" neo-Darwinians (in which guise Wallace's influence has maintained well into this century), he was able to successfully integrate natural selection with creationist fundamentalism by substituting the equanimity of an ordered and sustainable natural world for the guiding hand of God. In accordance with hyperselectionist theory, natural selection became an exclusive means of biological improvement, unsullied by Darwin's random mutations, chance extinctions and "correlations of growth," all evidence of a messier more capricious world Wallace and his supporters found difficult to quantify from the perspective of 19th century reductionist science.

Present-day educators and university administrators share Wallace's trepidations of a disordered natural world and apply hyperselectionist theory as a means of marginalizing critical thought within the context of dialectic analysis. Just as the hyperselect organism evolves a given trait for singular and immediate advantage, so too must the hyperselect concept evolve from dialectic variation into the rarefied isolation of universal truth. What role remains for critical thought in a deterministically-evolved order of knowledge from which "genius" emerges as an expression of nature's silent paradigm? The hyperselectionist university today is less a bastion of continued intellectual debate than a committee-driven amalgam of trite prosaisms, and its progeny — the university-educated artisans, engineers and administrators of this century and the next — victims of a growing trend towards uncritical analysis and the return of deterministic orthodoxy to the secular world of Western civilization.

1 Eastman, Carol M. Aspects of Language and Culture. 2nd Edition.
Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharp, 1990.

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