December 2007

Disneyland

“Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.”

— Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations”

The other day, one of the administrators at the community college where I teach emailed an article she said was “a good read.” I had a look at it: called “Customer Service and Student Respect: A Winning Combination,” by T. Hampton Hopkins, it suggests that colleges, particularly community colleges, should develop a “culture of excellence.” One way to achieve this, Hopkins argues, is by providing students with good “customer service.” He notes that some people (such as myself) are repelled by the idea of regarding students as customers, but brushes past our objections and focuses on the task at hand: “improving service delivery.” How to do this? By thinking of higher education as “a life event staged for students.”

Hopkins’ model for this is Disneyland:

“At Disney,” he says, “employees see signs as they are entering the park that read, ‘Think Disney Experience, Not Just Service.’ If community college personnel consistently, thoughtfully, and strategically focus on the student experience, excellence is likely to follow.”

My response to the article was to hit Reply All and ask, “Disney?? Does anyone besides me find this scary?” Apparently, no one did.
In the early ‘70s, when I was briefly living in New York, I read an article in the Village Voice called something like “The Disneyland Plot.” In it, Ronald Sukenick, the late novelist, hypothesized that the opening of Disneyworld in Orlando in 1971 was only the opening gambit in a much larger planned Disney takeover of America.

Hopkins’ article on “excellence” forcefully brought me back to Sukenick’s predictions. There have long been multiple signs of America’s growing distaste for reality, flagrantly manifested in the ‘80s by the election of Ronald Reagan, an actor whose fictions about “Morning in America” grabbed the popular imagination.

Because I did not live in America during most of his presidency, I was not subject to the all-out PR campaign waged by Reagan’s administration in cahoots with the media, so I never understood why people thought he was a “great communicator,” since his communications, apart from flashes of joviality, were written by speechwriters.

At around that same time, some of my students, mostly Americans in the military, expressed a devotion to an early computer game called “Zork,” and it seemed to me then that America was on the verge of losing touch with what is now called “the reality-based community.”

If at that point I had purchased stock in America’s ability to throw itself body and soul into a fantasy existence, I would be a rich woman today.

But I did not, so I teach at a community college in which despite remarkably few pay raises, we have been asked to do increasingly more to provide students—our customers—with positive “learning-centered” experiences.

Now it appears that nothing less than Disneyland is called for.

Despite my view of it as sinister, I have to admit that I have always had a penchant for Disney and its offshoots. As a child, I adored Disney movies, which now strike me as twisted and scary, and though I could see that the Disneyfication of such texts as Grimm’s fairy tales and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (its real title) basically eviscerated them, I didn’t mind. I was (then as now) a fan of escapist spectacle (which explains my obsession with Bollywood), of things that are colorful and dream-like and that temporarily erase the stupid mundane reality of the world we live in.

I have been to Disneyland several times, and loved it. The first time was when I was in college in Los Angeles; a guy I was sort of dating took my younger sister and me there. We went, not knowing what to expect, and were dazzled. From the heady first moment we walked onto Main Street USA, a fantasy version of the American small towns we had seen from the windows of our station wagon on family vacations, to the bliss of finally splashing into “Pirates of the Caribbean” after standing in line for over an hour, we felt like we were wandering in a dreamland. When we climbed aboard the boats of “It’s a Small World” and floated down its eerily calm stream, listening to thousands of tiny voices chirping its annoying refrain, my sister and I looked at each other and noticed that we were both crying.

So I am not one to dispute the power, even the charm, of Disney. But somehow I had never thought of academia in these terms. Sure, people say that college is an ivory tower inhabited by elitist escapists, but I’ve never found that to be true. Rather, it has seemed to me that academia by and large grapples with the world in a much more direct, honest, and enlightened way than, say, The New York Times, examining things critically and attempting, though not always succeeding, to expose fallacies, sophistry, casuistry, mountebankistry, double-dealing, and all manner of intellectual fraud.

On the other hand, academia is not always charming. It demands a great deal, intellectually, of its participants. Academia does not promise an easy A if only one follows the requirements; it asks one to move outside one’s own “comfort zone” and “subject position,” to read laborious texts, to write papers that force one to think so hard that sweat pours onto one’s keyboard. Do students always do this?

No. Do students wish things could be different? Judging from the amount of plagiarism I routinely run into, yes.

But speaking as someone who has been not only a teacher but a student for most of her life, someone who just—finally!—finished her doctorate the other day, as well as someone who for many years carried a Magic Kingdom Club card around in her wallet, I have to say that I think it’s precisely academia’s lack of resemblance to Disneyland that is its greatest strength.

For the problem with Disneyland is, pleasant though it undeniably is, it is not real. Last time I was there, as we rode around the park on the Monorail, I noticed that behind the parts of the park that can be seen from the ground are warehouses where trucks deliver things, maintenance people maintain, and the world is, unlike the world within, still drab and full of rubbish. In the middle of one’s holiday ecstasy, it is a disconcerting vision—somewhat like the vision the American people are finally beginning to glimpse of the war in Iraq—of what is beyond the illusion, beyond the theatrical props of which the “Disney Experience” is constructed.

According to T. Hampton Hopkins, the goal of providing students with this kind of Experience is to instill loyalty to the product—I mean, the college:

“Community colleges that truly commit to the idea of loyalty commit to quality for all students. The aphorism is about loyalty—creating experiences that not only retain and impress students, but also keep them coming.”

I agree that one of the goals of college should be to encourage loyalty, but in my opinion, that loyalty should be to the tools of intellectual inquiry, which are fundamentally not Disneyesque, and while we may not be able to agree on essential(ist) principles of truth or the nature of reality, I think we can all agree that Disneyland is a pageant, a chimera, a dream. And it is this dream from which we all must ultimately awaken if the world is going to survive.

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