Welcome to ZARDOZ U

In the 70's cult film ZARDOZ, a group of eternally youthful geniuses inhabit semi-ritzy, low-tech kibbutzim called "vortexes" where they conduct scientific research (like studying the sex drive -- a drive they no longer possess), and where they also archive artistic masterworks of the past. The vortex we see contains an impressive repository of the past. Van Gogh's sit side by side with chandeliers and 18th Century baroque clocks in a vast museum. The inhabitants "know" all of human culture: languages, sciences, music, arts, history, literature.

At first glance, the vortex seems "utopian." The people here dress like hippies, they meditate on intellectual matters, and remain connected to each other through a crystal implanted in their foreheads. That crystal in turn connects them all to a supercomputer that they can ask questions of or feed data into. Moreover, the place is completely democratic and everyone votes on everything all the time. This apparently Rousseauian community makes every decision by discussion in committee. Eternally. For these people never die.

But beware of launching a critique of your peers. We see a serious young man on trial for intimating that there is something "rotten" in their society. The punishment for such treason? Aging. A lead character in the film decides to vote in defense of the critiquer, even as he observes to the "brutal" invader (played by Sean Connery), "It won't do any good. It never does." The vote is almost unanimous against the defendant, and the guilty critiquer goes off to get aged several years. But, his solitary defender ends up getting aged too, for hurling insults at the group over luncheon. He is relegated to a nutty emeritus space where the men wear top hats, the ladies wear fancy dresses, and there is dancing to old scratchy records all the time. In this house of exile, there is another room where the founder of the vortex lies in a hospital bed. He is on life-support; he is dying, but can never die.

What critiques against the genius community has he committed, we wonder, to have been condemned to such a fate?

On the outside of the vortex, a brutal post-apocalyptic anarchy reigns, and one is tempted to feel sorry for the vortex-inhabitants. But at the end we discover that the vortex citizens are indeed the children of the rich, the powerful, and the "clever" who walled themselves into their pastoral hiding place, as those on the outside starved and struggled to get in.

ZARDOZ is a silly movie in many ways. But looking at the film in September 2006, I recognize the social dynamics of the vortex.

The vortex is the university. It is the besieged place where intellectuals forestall and bracket the important questions -- some (but not all) of them being:

What IS our relationshop to the outside society we serve?
What are we supposed to be doing?
What alternative space should we/can we offer?
What should education be now? What should it look like? How should it be conducted?

Most of us are not asking these questions, because -- in ZARDOZ terms -- it is too dangerous. The university has become the vortex -- the place where we deny in order to go on, in order to maintain the status quo -- at best, to expand, to have vast graduate programs, or at worst, to just survive -- in order to just continue, because, well, because, it's what we do.

Perhaps, as happens at the end of the film, the vortex-university will be destroyed. This is, I believe, a risk that we need to run, if we are to make any sense at all of who we have become and what we need to do in order to be a living community of learners rather than a moribund collection of individuals incased in a ruined bunker. A dead institution is of no use to anyone -- except the few top administrators who profit from the proceeds. Or perhaps the university will become something else. Many students believe it has to. Some staff and faculty secretly think so too.

Here's another thought: Somatic Therapy practitioners call traumatic recall, a "vortex." Don't all of us at the university inhabit a traumatized space, where fear, paranoia, and the fight-flight impulse prevail? This is no place/way to get work done. Knowledge can't happen in such a space. Not really.

Here's to pulling the curtain from the face of ZARDOZ U. What will we see behind the curtain? The wizard? Or some bureaucrat pulling levers, and using a special effects sound system to make scary sounds?

Let's find out.