pantsfarm

I originally wrote this a few weeks ago with the intention of having it paired with a response from a friend. However, things haven’t worked out and so before it gets too dated, I figure I’ll go ahead and post it here.

I’m also going to ask Jerry of overtfiasco to post the essay he submitted, after I told him about the contest hours before the deadline.

August 5, 2007

The NYTimes is running an essay contest in which current college students are asked to read Rick Perlstein’s article “What’s the Matter with College” and respond to the question “Is the college experience less critical to the nation than it was a generation ago?”

However while reading the article itself, I found myself wondering how exactly what he was saying was supposed to help current students address the question at hand. The article opens with an anecdote of how college campuses were a big deal for political campaigns in 1966. Evidently some forty years ago, people cared a lot more about what’s going on in colleges than they do now. Or at least they cared about it in some fundamentally different way.

Now Perlstein feels that “College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.” To back up this claim he takes a handful of students’ experiences at the University of Chicago and extrapolates to his own unreasonable conclusion.

To compare the U of C now with the U of C fifteen years ago and conclude that colleges in general are different in the US seems like a pretty pointless exercise. To draw any conclusions about the state of college campuses based on the University of Chicago alone is I think the first mistake. The second is comparing a campus now with the same campus fifteen years ago and expecting there not to be any significant change in environment in spite of the world outside changing so drastically.

Perlstein touches on this briefly in saying that one of the undergraduates he interviewed “is an exaggeration, too, of another banal new reality”, the brave new world where teenagers have unfettered access to independent films, “forbidden” books and can find people who share their interests no matter how eccentric. Explaining this, he writes “Now, for even the most provincial students, the Internet, a radically more democratic and diverse culture – and those hip baby-boomer parents – take care of [access to the above listed experiences].” I’m still not sure what about this reality is so banal though.

In many ways I feel like adolescence is being extended these days. I’m not really sure because obviously I am just a young’un myself, but it feels like for some people, they had so much of their time carefully planned out for their studies, their sports, their service projects, etc. On the other hand there are those kids with their “hip baby-boomer parents” who have the wherewithal to accommodate their child’s every creative whim. In both cases I think the result is a relationship between parent and child dramatically different from that of the relationship that I imagine to have existed between my parents and my grandparents, or really of any sufficiently old-enough person and their parents.

The whole ritual of growing up isn’t the same. College isn’t necessarily this huge step into a liberated world free to become a member of the “lounge community”, because they’ve been exposed to such freedoms all along. For others, college might just be an extension of their planned and directed lives.

And then there’s the fact that these are still both extremes, and in between is what I suspect the majority. College isn’t full of the unbridled joy and revelation Perlstein seems to romanticize, nor is it some miserable uncreative plodding existence exemplified by one of the students he interviewed, Hamilton Morris.

I think perhaps what bothered me most about the article was this Hamilton Morris who found himself so miserable at Chicago. I am a little confused about why it is he ended up there to begin with, given that he is “a filmmaker, painter, photographer, an experienced professional standup comedian.” I can not really imagine how he could have visited Chicago without realizing that it was not for him, given this illustrious background. That he stayed a whole year even, surprises me the most. I guess among his abundant talents is a willingness to subject himself to a life he doesn’t like when he doesn’t have to.

And it appears I’m not the first person (a, b) to have grown tired of defending Chicago from accusations of being a no-fun place on top of responding to this article.

I’ve strayed from the original question, “Is the college experience less critical to the nation than it was a generation ago?” To this, I answer “yes.” To the statement “College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.” I propose that it has already ended. Provided the representation given by Persltein is accurate, and the college ritual really was such an integral part of some people’s passage into adulthood, I think it has been replaced. College now strikes me as in many ways an extension of adolescent life. If anything, it has replaced “adolescence” with life through high school being little more than an extended childhood. This is perhaps less true for individuals such Hamilton Morris, with his impressively rich and different (from mine) upbringing. However in his case, given his own progression through life it seemed as if perhaps college wasn’t really the answer to his search for a more fulfilling and enriching life. At least not college as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago.

College as an opportunity to go out and find out what you’re interested in, or to find and spend time with others like you, is no more. Those opportunities come earlier and earlier as younger and younger people adopt and use the myriad tools available to them by virtue of the Internet and our modern connected lives. Though hardly a replacement to sitting in a lounge and discussing whatever, facebook and message boards may just suffice.

Parents’ roles in their children’s lives have also changed in such a way that leaving home is no longer the same pivotal event that it once was. With parents cutting the cord later and later, for some young adults leaving adolescence seems to have shifted from going to college to getting a job and finally achieving some semblance of independence.

College is dead, long live college.