there is on aspect to the anon critiques i got last week that i want to spend a moment discussing, for the sake of transparency.

yes. i do have a lot post-secondary education. roughly, i spent the years 18-29 in university. eleven long years. for a while, i totally thought i”d be a career academic. that didn”t work out for me. i now work as a non-academic at a university.

i have one BA, one MA, and one MLIS. one bachelors, one research masters, and one professional masters.

my research fields were: Chinese philosophy and logic. i could narrow this down further. i studied Warring States philosophy, with a focus on logic. i studied philosophical logic and metalogic in the white tradition. in both areas, i have a decent grounding in the overall intellectual history from ancient to modern times.

i have mixed feelings about my education. on the one hand, i truly loved researching and studying Chinese philosophy. on the other hand, i am totally complicit in the Orientalism of the white supremacist university.

the one thing i am really happy about is that i, at least, spent a lot of time learning the philosophy of people who are not white. so much of my current worldview has been influenced by this, for which i”m grateful since it has made unlearning and deconstructing all the white supremacist garbage i learned in school much, much easier.

since graduating from my last degree, unlearning has really been a major focus for me. this is the reason why i”m so critical of ‘higher education”, academics, and everything that goes along with it.

but this is, absolutely, a privilege that i have. i went to one of the ‘best” universities in canada (and thus the world). between my job and alumni access i can a access pretty much any and all academic research published in english (as well as many other languages). i am not only a trained researcher but what is known as an ‘information professional”. despite having less and less patience for academic jargon and writing, i can read and comprehend most of it. in approximately three languages (english, Chinese, and Japanese – although, i”d probably struggle a lot with Japanese nowadays).

now you know. i hope this is all about as clear as i can make it. it is what it is. i”m neither proud nor ashamed of my education.