Everyone hates school, particularly those who claim to love school and love being in school. This love is based on a fundamental and overwhelming hate to have arbitrary rules, deadlines, points, and pressure placed upon your shoulders at every turn.

I like teaching. I don’t like school. I have always seen my teaching as a radical repudiation of school. No attendance, no nonsense, nothing that could be perceived as being a part of my class because we are in school and we need to do school-flavored things. But this is the year where that approach has caused me to start hating being a teacher too.

The students, no matter who they are whether you like them, are indifferent to them, or hope they surprise you, are astoundingly incapable. The only thing they know how to do is skirt. They know how to creep around and close to the borders; they know how to game the system. I am giving an oral examination in my rhetorical theory course for a final and they are flipping out. Not because they don’t know the material; it’s because they do not know how to game it.

An essay final, take home, or even timed writing or an objective final exam would be better for them because they would have a level of comfort built up about what’s expected. They do not have to study because they will have their scripts about stress, anxiety, depression, ad nauseum ready to go to account for the failure of the exam. “I’m having a really hard time in my family life and at home right now, can I do an alternate assignment to pass?” Let a thousand emails bloom!

These same students are confronting the cops and building tent cities on universities across the United States right now. This is confounding. They are happy to miss class, blame “anxiety” for why they can’t be there, and then spend all their time engaged in a very weird form of protest – a sort of remixed teach-in with the angry, dramatic discourse of a tik tok video that purports to know a vital truth but never quite gets to the reveal.

Students are struggling because what they have learned about education is purely about the location of bodies. Are you in your seat on time? Are you absent? Remember, 25% of the class is attendance. Is your camera on? Please turn your camera on. You have to have your camera on in this online class or you are absent. If you are playing with your phone, I will mark you absent. Why? Because if you are on your phone you are not present. Did you do your discussion board post on Canvas? Blackboard? Moodle? It is due before midnight. The body must produce it’s trace before midnight! When I think of Canvas and Blackboard message board posts I think of the BT creatures from the video game Death Stranding, leaving their wet, black handprints all over in a desperate effort to claim a body once again.

So it is no wonder that the students have decided that protest means to put their bodies in places where the bodies are unauthorized. Let’s camp on the quad, let’s put our bodies between the administration building and the quad. Let’s block the Starbucks! The one liberty a student has, to choose to move their body into Starbucks – denied. This will be their political awakening. Note: Nobody chooses to block the library, telling us all we need to know about the contemporary university.

To remove bodies, they must be stamped. The administration has stamped them as traspassers. They are attending, they are attentive, but they are not in the right place – a classroom. They are trespassing. Police, remove the disobedient bodies. Notice there is not an attempt to offer a transitional space or conversation with the bodies at all. The university reveals what it is really all about – discipline and control, nothing else.

This is the time of year my students beg for higher grades – “My body was where it should have been!” or more popularly, “My mental health prevented me from placing my body where it should have been, please give me the points.” Even more complex: "Mental Health comes first. My body is where it should be to preserve my mental health. I am happy to do the assignments now, at the end of the term now that I have done the right thing."

How and why should I grade these appeals? What element of higher education is being practiced here? What does this say about their understanding of the course content? It says nothing. It is practice in what the university, the world has come to be – nothing but rewarding the presence of bodies with points for being there. The university has given up. The professors grade the presence of bodies to prepare the students in the art of coming up with reasons they should still get paid even though they do not spend the appropriate amount of time in their assigned cubicle on some floor of some office building filled with fluorescent wonder.