I

		actively repressed. Extra bonus points go to students who are able to duplicate, on the cheap, Hollywood's special effects. A brochure from Florida State University's film school, for instance, extols a fifty-foot-high explosion in a student film, a train crashing into a car in another, a three-hundred-pound Bengal tiger sharing the screen with a boy in a third, etc. Once a year, each film school proudly invites agents, producers, and other studio representatives to take a look at its recent graduates. On their own, students also vie to show their films at Sundance, the student Academy Awards, on PBS, and on cable.

		For critics of the system, such slavish rehearsal amounts to "machine-tooling the young" to the needs of a corporate sponsor. 36 Film students today are not unlike college athletes vying for employment in the National Football League. This much is evident. More ominously, today's programs can also be seen as furthering "the development of nonideological, technically oriented centers" where "an apolitical, value-free, non-activist achievement-oriented student body can be trained.''37 In film in particular, it is clear that the "general education" requirement the Harvard Report hoped to safeguard within specialized schooling has been given up without a fight. In Madan Sarup's words, it all boils down to: "the question now being asked by the student, the state or the university is no longer 'Is it true?' but 'What use is it?' In the context of the mercantilization of knowledge, more often than not this question is equivalent to: 'Is it saleable?'"38 Alone in the industry, the great cinematographer, sometimes director, Haskell Wexler has condemned this utilitarian view of film education. Every idea for a script or a film, he suggests, is now measured against: "Will it help me get a job?" Even the choice of a film school may be decided by: "Will I meet the right people there?" Such calculated planning, however, keeps students from making the most of their years in film school. It impedes them from trying out "new ways of looking at things." In the final analysis, the operation is counterproductive even for the industry insofar as, ultimately, it needs unconventional talent to keep going. And Wexler to conclude: "If you can't experiment when you are a student, forget it, because for the rest of your life you're going to have to be practical. . . ."39

		VII

		The best-known film schools would of course deny they favor a vocational mentality. We do not tell our students how to do things, their pro-