Last night I had one of those maddening Facebook arguments– I’d like to think it was a debate, but it was probably just an argument–that illustrate just how pervasive conservative ideas have become. The key phrase was, “some people are just not meant for college.”  A few hundred years ago that was the exact phrase used to justify keeping everyone  in the political dark except for white men with property. Now it’s become one of those falsely “hard-nosed” phrases that certain otherwise liberal people use to sound “realistic” and “pragmatic.”  We’d love a world in which college is affordable for all but “some people are just not meant for college.” Is it just genetics?

It’s nonsense, of course. Even as recently as fifteen years ago no one who considered themselves liberal, much less progressive, would ever say such a thing; the echos of the long history o discrimination and eugenics were too strong. Years of conservative marketing, though, seems to have wiped out the semantic common sense that sends up alarms when something like this pops up.  It’s also a problem of our American ignorance about socioeconomic class and our increasingly distorted self-image as a culture that encourages equality and mobility.  At one moment we seem to be moving towards an understanding that inequity is a result of policy, and then the insight fades again.

These were my brood-y dark thoughts as I read, “For class warfare, there’s the 1%, and then there’s the 0.1%,” by Henry Banta on the Nieman Watchdog website. Underneath the persuasive conservative rhetoric– especially tropes like “some people are just not meant for college”– lies a reality that seems nearly inaccessible to what might be called the political common sense of the United States. We’ve– using “we” in the loosest sense–created a profoundly unequal society that concentrates wealth in a deeply alarming and unprecedented fashion.  That’s hard to stomach  so we respond by creating a kind of naturalized fantasy to explain the results. It “those people” again.

I knew a jerk once– if someone acts like this it’s fair to call him a jerk– who was so incensed about his students (possible) use of Wikipedia that he proposed a pedagogical exercise to prove how awful it was. He would purposely plant false information on the online encyclopedia and then ask his students a question in class that they would need to do research to answer. They’d go home, or to the library, presumably, punch in their question to Google, and get the planted false answer from Wikipedia. The next day in class, the professor could laugh knowingly and make an important point: Wikipedia is worthless.

This jerk– he’s still a professor as well a jerk– thought this little game was both beneficial to his students and a real hoot. It didn’t work only because when he shared his clever little game with his colleagues via our department listserv a quick-witted professor jumped over to Wikipedia and corrected the misinformation. Mr. Jerk quickly realized he’d been beaten and dropped his plans. I was more than a little surprised, though, that there was very little discussion of the ethics of his behavior which seemed to me to reflect a profoundly corrupt notion of both pedagogy and of the aims and goals of Wikipedia.

This happened nearly a decade ago but it came to mind as I was reading, “Wikipedia Goes to College,” in “Fast Company.” The author, Neal Ungerleider, isn’t exactly hostile to Wikipedia, although his sense of the company’s history seems oddly attenuated, but his language suggests an equally profound misunderstanding of the institution.  Wikipedia, Ungerleider says, is launching a new program that is designed to “crack the market”  by reinforcing its academic reputation and helping it develop more non-English articles.  Does Wikipedia “crack markets” in the same fashion as, say, Apple or Sony?

I don’t meant to suggest that Wikipedia is an ideal organization or that the online encyclopedia has solved all of its problems. I do think it’s fair to say, though, that the reports of Wikidepian inaccuracy are often exaggerated. I don’t use Wikipedia in formal research assignments, simply because I want students to become familiar with peer-reviewed journals.  Wikipedia isn’t trying to “crack the market”  via its ongoing search for a system of checks and balances. The jerk would disagree, and it sounds unsexy and unfashionable,  but Wikipedia is trying to expand the reach and availability of human knowledge.