SAVE The JKS

To the students stuck dealing with this mess:

[From my seat in Buffalo, I can’t pretend to be as informed as you who are in the thick of it, but as a Naropa W&P alum who spent a significant portion of my time at Naropa as a fairly militant activist (I spent two years in prison after my first year at Naropa, for a direct action involving fire and a construction site), I offer these thoughts from my experience, my mistakes, and my love for Naropa and the Kerouac School.]

If financial “realities” are allowed to determine the future of Naropa, there will be no future for Naropa. And if financial conditions are ignored, there will be no future for Naropa. Such a situation is certainly frightening—for those of you who are current students, but also for those of us who will always love the place for what it did to us. But it is not a situation that calls for panic. Even if there are some there who don’t fully understand the value of the place, or who misunderstand its values, Naropa remains full of people who get it. I beg all of you there to work together to make sure that Naropa survives as the anomalous, bizarre, and indestructible jewel it is.

The students have more power than any other group at Naropa—maybe not officially, but without you nothing else happens. If that power is not recognized, you must (on behalf of all past and future students) help others to recognize it. Nothing substantial should happen at Naropa without the approval of the students. And having that power means that you owe it to past and future students to conduct yourselves on their behalf, helping to maintain it as a source of inspiration, disturbance, and fierce commitment to creative reality. However, if you see the administration as your enemies, you will be fighting a war, and wars do nothing but destroy what they’re ostensibly meant to protect. To the extent that we fight anyone, we are helping to destroy the community by making it just like every other shitty, dull institution in a nation of shitty, vicious competition. If we see that someone is fighting or competing for power, it is our responsibility to do our best to restore cooperation. Otherwise, Naropa will become just another nest of competition, corruption, infighting and personal agendas—in other words, it will become just another university. Please don’t let Naropa become just another university. There are more than enough of them already.

It’s always more difficult to communicate with administrators who may not be artists or practitioners, and you of course have to take this into account when dealing with them—but not in the sense of using this as an excuse to attack them. Instead, we must be even more patient, informed, straightforward, and compassionate with them, because they may not have the direct, personal appreciation for the value of our practices that we do. If you feel that elements in the administration are not listening, it may be that they don’t understand your language. Maybe some of them are speaking an impoverished language of capitalist institutional bureaucratic standardization and competition, but communicating with others is always and necessarily a task of patient translation, in both directions. If they don’t get it, help them.

This is not to say that I think you should compromise the important mission of the Kerouac School or any of its components and sister programs. I believe that the Kerouac School is the most important thing that Naropa does. In fact, Naropa needs to invest more in developing and enriching the Kerouac School. It’s not a matter of ambition, or growing the program, or keeping it “competitive,” it’s a matter of keeping it relevant and fresh, increasing its ability to serve its students.

To the extent that you act as informed members of the community—perhaps members who understand better than the administration the importance of the Kerouac School, because you understand it from its insides—then there is a greater chance that frightened people will be open to your help in figuring a way out of this crisis—and of course this is a financial crisis that is being felt by every university (and of course every working person) in the country. Once again, we find ourselves cleaning up a mess left by competitive, self-centered capitalist stupidity, and if we act like them, we’ll just make the mess worse.

The Kerouac School is the most important thing Naropa does. Without it, I fear Naropa would become Esalen or New College (i.e., a self-help retreat for the rich or an empty building inhabited by memories of experiment). Without it, Naropa would lose its edge. By losing its edge it would lose its connection to its founder, Chogyam Trungpa, who consistently risked everything that most people value in order to live an always-fresh reality. We are lucky to have him as an example of the messy, unpredictable risk of becoming ourselves. I trust you all to honor that tradition by finding unique and surprising solutions to living in a world that seems to want to reduce every difference to the same old story. To do that, we will no doubt have to sacrifice the temptation to grandstand or live out dull Hollywood clichés and ’60’s biopic versions of activism.

I’m confident that if you all talk together as people who want to save the place that the vast majority of you love, Naropa will continue. Even if there is a minority who has some weird agenda for the place, those who want to preserve its ability to surprise us all are certainly in the majority. If that majority works together, no one can hijack the place, or crash it. Just pulling off that kind of radical cooperation would go a long way to maintain and revivify its anomalousness, bizarreness, and indestructibility, and would earn the undying gratitude of those of us in the diaspora. We are all rooting for you.

In solidarity,

Jeremiah Rush Bowen

BA, W&P and INTD, Naropa University ’06

MA, Poetry, Temple University ’09

PhD candidate, Poetics, SUNY Buffalo