To Be A Rogue Academic

Desiring a Humanist Education

I was never smart. I despised school. Maybe it could be distilled down to the fact that I was bullied, or maybe I was just too stubborn. I didn’t believe in education, because education didn’t believe in me. Thrown into the machine to be worked and formed into a box checker, a straight-A statistic for the school reports, to be a fine candidate for a university, and to make that university look fantastic as an alumni. I received counseling in elementary school just to figure out why I didn’t like school. All I could say was that “It’s too hard. I’m always bored.”

That is a quote straight from my journal. I have done a lot of introspection lately about my education since I’ve graduated college. It was not a bad education by any standards, but it felt hopeless, especially high school. Hopeless until I took AP history courses, that is. Suddenly I was opened to a realm of academic discovery I previously had not been privy to. I was fulfilling my desires to research and discover things that I wanted to know about, and in turn, learned about myself.

I became a rogue academic.

The term sounds far more radical than what it really is, but to put it simply, I took over my own education. Not that I left high school or chose to skip college (obviously), but that I told myself all the reasons why I want to learn, to “be educated.” 1) I wanted to hold my own in a conversation with my peers. 2) I wanted to be an authority on a topic of my choosing. 3) I wanted to grow as a person, to be open to ideas new, old, radical, and otherwise because that matters to me. 4) I wanted to improve my writing. 5) I wanted to go into the world kindly, and open to “learning” in its many forms, because that idea of learning doesn’t belong to a system or an institution. It is a fundamental human function. Our brains are wired to absorb knowledge and experience for later use.

The rogue academic is not someone who bucks the systems of education for the sake of bucking the system or being an outsider. The rogue academic seeks to attain knowledge for self discovery, the betterment of the soul and the human, and the general betterment of society, and that most often comes through formal education. However, the rogue is born out of a revelation and not the system. Their desire to learn comes from a transcendental feeling to grow, and to figure out who they are, the world they inhabit, and their place in that world. Many of these are molded by the systems which they have generally come to view as difficult or boring or useless. YouTuber Robin Waldun explains that this may come in the simplest forms: a high schooler believing that their education is pointless, and has no benefit to themselves, or a college student finding their intended degree is not what they want to pursue because it isn’t working for them. However, the choice then is on the student or learner to either fully give up on learning, or to learn for themselves. Waldun says this feeling of despair in education and its systems stems from the fact that “we have industrialized education at the cost of the spirit of focused discovery, the spirit of breakthrough, and the spirit of innovation.” Waldun argues that the “higher up” understanding of education will never change, meaning the legislative decisions and systems will remain the same (we might call this Education with a capital “E”), but we can change our understanding of education (little “e”). The heart of learning comes from the individual and their choice to want to learn in a passionate and healthy way.

This reminds me of one of my former history professors who would often say with a smirk, “You know I’m doing this for you guys too?” That professor wanted to impart knowledge and new ways of thinking to his students because he cared about them, about the future, it wasn’t that he was just tenured and could ego-stroke by ‘talking smart’ about whatever he pleased knowing we’d have to listen. He wanted us to learn for the sake of growing ourselves, rounding out our edges as humans. I found the more I took notes in his class, the less I understood of what he wanted us to see, and when I stopped, his ideas came to life.

While I’m certain—and I am, having talked to him out of class often—that his world view is not “average” by any means, and he would like others to understand his world view, he never wanted to convert us to it. Rather, he wanted us to be exposed to it, to learn to apply new lenses to life that have previously been laughable, or “kooky” or involved in topics not given as much attention. That professor is probably the smartest person I know, though I still don’t always agree with what he believes.

I did not know what a vocation was until my first senior semester at Penn State. I did not know that I viewed learning as my vocation. I have told many people that “I would like to be a student until I am dead.” Everyday is full of information and knowledge, it is up to me, to us, to tap into it.

For instance, I took a photography class, and at the end of the semester, my professor and I were on fairly friendly terms. It had been a long semester, as the class satisfies a gen-ed nearly every major needed, and in the projects, it was clear to see that not very many students took it seriously. “It’s hard to really feel a passion for teaching the stuff you love,” she told me, “when almost all of your students are only here to satisfy a gen-Ed credit, and can’t be bothered to think creatively.” Now that could be considered a generalization, but from my experience, I can confidently say it was not. Of 50 students, there were maybe 10 who put in serious effort, and a handful more that were frequently inspired, but never pushed themselves.¹ From the first day of class it was obvious that our professor not only knew what she was talking about, but was passionate about it. She shared her work, knowledge, and connections with, and for us, and we often met these with cold silence, moreso awkward quiet. And I remembered during that conversation I was having with her, that we were all paying to be quiet, paying hundreds of dollars for this course to sit there boredly and get a credit.

Evan Puschak wrote in his book Escape into Meaning that as a younger student, he did not care about learning. Shocker, I know. However, he makes a pointed critique at the education system for making him this way, and his own familial influence. “Did my world want me to know the significance of irony in Pride and Prejudice? The atomic structure of various metals? Roman emperors? Not really. It wanted good report cards."² It is this mentality— that all education is just a stepping stone to the perennial “job” of the future— that prevails often in university classrooms. We as students fool ourselves that our classes have nothing to teach us, only something to offer us, a grade, and nothing more. That there is nothing beyond “doing well” to be gained from a class. Learning does not need to be miserable. Why not enter a photography class and try? What is the risk of taking the class at face value, a place to learn and challenge oneself, and trying in it? That you might learn something you never use professionally, that you might become a more well rounded person, that you might find something interesting and that would make you a boring person somehow, that you might enjoy it? Learning is about more than wandering into the florescent lights of a comfy gig at some alphabet-soup corproation or office.

Learning can be a vocation even if you have one, or are working. Who says being a student, or a learner-for-life can’t be a kind of job? I realize that not everyone wants, or can do this, and I say this from a place of privilage, but learning is not a death sentence if you enjoy it. We are not— for the most part— in high school where it is assumed you will produce good numbers for the school to be handed more money. We are fully self-aware, cognisant humans. Take advantage of all that space up in your brain. Knowledge has no material weight, carry all you can. Learn to love to learn. Do you follow me? Let’s see what Puschak has to say:

Discovering a love of learning felt like a rebirth. That nagging sense of pointlessness yielded to a promise of substance in every direction. The world lit up with questions, and questions generated questions. It’s an exhilarating and terrifying experience to walk the road of your ignorance. Learning, you learn, is not really a process of expanding your mind, but watching it shrink against all there is to know. It's humbling, but addicting.³

To the point that learning can be something you desire, or that can be born out of a student to further their education because they want to know, or educate, or so on, Greg Ashman who writes about education on Substack has this to say:

I am interested in education because I am interested in human agency. I want to equip students with the tools they need to go on the adventures they choose. These adventures may be vocational — the way many view the purpose of education — but they may also be intellectual, philosophical or even spiritual. In a sense, it is futile for me to try to anticipate labels for these adventures because I cannot know what future humans equipped with the superpower of cultural curated knowledge will embark upon. That’s why education is exciting.

I don’t mean to prattle on, and make you read the word “education” or “learning” more than I need to, so allow me to at least say a few last remarks. To be educated is no the only way of life in this world that brings greater value than already being alive. It is not even the preferred way, but one of many modes. Because someone has not been formally educated, or chooses not to continue their learning, or chooses not to read or so on, does not mean they bear no value, that they are less, or they are inherently, “stupid”. Being a rogue academic should allow you to understand that. We are all students of the world, and should desire to learn from every kind of person, and be open, and appreciative of the ideas of many, even if we do not agree, or have previously “disliked” them. In this way, we practice our humanist understanding of education, and self education. “Morality, in central part” as William MacAskill writes, “is about putting ourselves in other's’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own.”⁴ It is this sentiment that I, as a student in the history field, must apply often. I must look at the world from the eyes of heroes, villians, women, men, people, slaves, and slaveholders, so on and so forth, to understand how they lived, viewed the world, and interracted with it. In this way, we may put together a fuller picture of the past, and thus the present. So must we, rogue academics, use this technique to learn in our desired patches of interest.

We are humans, after all, and we must treat each other as such.

1. Many of these passages are repurposed from an old article I wrote that I do not think encapsulates the ideas that I have presented here. This article, I feel, is a better depiction of the former, and perhaps again in the future I will add to this.

2. Puschak, Evan Escape into Meaning. Simon and Schuster, 2022 p. 3

3. Puschak, p. 5

4. This is from MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future, and I quote it lightly, as I have only begun to read it, but I believe the sentiment here is applicable to the situation, but not across the board, as being open to everything means also being open to unsavory and harmful ideas, which I don’t think is often worthwhile, unless only to understand it, and overcome it.