Jerry Farber has been a California civil rights activist for many years, as well as an outspoken critic of the American education system. He is currently a professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University.

Professor Farber first collided with the American academic culture thirty years ago with his article, "The Student as Nigger," which was published in an underground Los Angeles newspaper in 1967, but received far wider exposure through the informal exchange of bootleg copies. For a time, nearly everybody on American university campuses was reading it and nearly everyone was talking about it. The article may have penetrated nearly all of the American higher education establishment, hand-to-hand.

Farber shocked many because of his generous and calculated use of taboo language--including a word in the article's title, which he used advisedly--but he also provoked much thought about the campus culture of the time, which in some ways resembled television's "The Paper Chase." American university life is different now because the country went through the 1960s, and Professor Farber's 1967 article is one of the reasons. Over the years since, it has been included in many freshman composition anthologies, as well as in a philosophy textbook called Classics of Western Thought.

Now, higher education is taking another turn, and Jerry is worried about it. The article which appears here is also published in the World Wide Free Press, and an earlier version appeared in the San Diego State University Daily Aztec.

The student and the screen

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