February 2, 1995
The emcee at a freshman rally yells at a crowd of fist-pumping recent high school graduates, "How many of you came here to change the world?
"How many of you came here to make a lot of money?" The crowd increases its frenzied applause.
These are the first two lines of "Higher Learning."
Here, director John Singleton asserts that higher education in this society is based on greed and manipulation. To go to college if you are black or Hispanic or Asian or white means that you will be treated differently based on that heritage.
Maybe Singleton's fictional university is a microcosm of society as a whole. Or maybe it is a figment of his imagination, a compilation of the bad things he saw over his entire career at The University of Southern California balled up into one semester: one semester of a college freshman class in which every featured character suffers a trauma or many traumatic incidents.
This overblown, sophomoric look at college life is nothing but an excuse to sensationalize the serious issues that students face.
While mentor and Professor Maurice Phipps presents a moral equation to a young African-American student athlete by telling him he must not expect to be treated differently because he is black, the film shows a world where all people should expect to be treated differently because of their race.
These are real issues that affect real living people. As the real universities in this country become more diverse, this glamorous look at what amounts to a race war on a college campus sends out a simplified version of a very complex issue. The movie presents a discouraging scenario for a real high school graduate to face.
I have been in college for the past six years. I have witnessed both preferential treatment and abuse by professors, police, and other students because of race. Racism happens and college students must deal with it.
But, for some reason Singleton seems to promote the impression that a student of color should expect discrimination. Not one of the students within the race conflict stopped to ask themselves, "Wait, what are we fighting about?" Everyone looks bad in this film.
The intricacy of the issues Singleton is trying to address is not done justice by the quick simple approach he gives to issues such as sexism and racism on campus.
Unfortunately, he's just scratching the surface, leaving racial hatred as the dominant emotion in "Higher Learning."