I hate final exams. They devour my entire life. I don’t mind hard work or sleepless all-night studying, but I resent the fact that all my attention is devoted to these ultimately meaningless tests. Whatever I do, wherever I go, these damned finals preoccupy me to the point that I don’t care about anything else. It’s hard to pay much attention to gay rights or the economy or a social life when you are obsessively reviewing the history of the United States’ shenanigans in the Cold War for an upcoming Test of Death.
Because final exams and most other college work occupy so much space in a college student’s mind, I rarely take anybody seriously who complains that today’s students are politically apathetic and need to become more active in the community. The university is an environment that encourages, fosters and in many ways requires self-centeredness, often at the cost of becoming informed or involved in the issues outside it. College students are inherently selfish, simply because they are in college. Students have to obsess over their own personal tests, finals, grades, tuition, grad school applications and eventual employment.
In such an environment where everything you do affects you and you alone, apathy toward anything that doesn’t concern you is only natural. An issue needs to be incredibly well-marketed and targeted directly to students with a direct and obvious impact on their well-being in order to penetrate the university bubble. Simply goading students or tickling their guilt reflex won’t convince many to care about reforming ASM or voting for a new Union South.
I have nothing but respect for those who do care, but I can hardly blame the majority of students for living in an environment that fosters narcissism. As New York Times columnist Thomas “Old-Enough-To-Be-My-Dad” Friedman wrote last Sunday, “Our kids should be so much more radical than they are today. [But] I understand why they aren’t. They’re so worried about just getting a job or paying next semester’s tuition.”
It isn’t only this generation of college students that has trouble getting involved with issues that don’t immediately concern them, either. College has bred self-centeredness among its students for several generations now. Even the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, often cited for their massive student involvement, were not completely free of self-interest. As is apparent in David Maraniss’ excellent book “They Marched Into Sunlight” (the best required reading I’ve had all semester; everyone should check it out over break), which covers the first violent anti-war protest in Madison, relatively few students were involved in Vietnam War protests solely because of injustice in Vietnam.
One of the first peaceful demonstrations drew several thousand protestors, but the issue was more about the draft than the war. The following semester, just over 100 protestors staged the obstructive sit-in in Ingraham Hall that eventually turned violent when confronted by the police. By that night, they managed to draw over 3,000 sympathizers who joined in subsequent protests over the next several weeks.
However, most of these sympathizers were not protesting the war itself, but the police brutality inflicted on college students — a much smaller core of activists actually felt it their moral duty to actively crusade against United States involvement in Vietnam. It took a direct impact on students, as well as the visceral sight of policemen clubbing students over the head, to involve a greater amount of students.
This semester’s presidential campaign marked the most recent time that a massive group of students became excited about politics. President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign succeeded among campuses (in comparison to John Kerry’s, anyway) largely because it was so effective in marketing directly to college students. The campaign took advantage of newer e-mail and online networking technology, used primarily by college-aged voters, to an unprecedented degree. Obama’s charisma, eloquence and appealing “change” rhetoric provided an accessible image, with which one could easily identify without distracting too much from tests and job hunts. Obama’s campaign, like so many others to varying degrees, focused less on the technical issues than on incredibly effective (and, quite frankly, refreshingly inspirational) marketing and persuasive, accessible rhetoric. This strategy struck gold as several thousand students celebrated on State Street. The campaign sparked enthusiasm among so many students because of its effectiveness in seizing students’ attention, not the other way around.
Whether excitement over Obama will last and carry into other issues remains to be seen. For now, though, I can’t be bothered to worry — I have my own grades to worry about. No doubt when we leave college, we’ll be more informed about our society and better equipped to vote or act in the community. Heck, we might even want to spend a year in Teach for America or the Peace Corps, just to devote a year or two to helping others — the most radical shift I can imagine from four years of self-serving effort in college. In the meantime, we might as well accept that our educational environment encourages selfishness and narcissism, and anyone who hopes to speak through the bubble has to make an extra effort.
Jack Garigliano ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in history and English.
