Damn. After four years of making sure the Herald’s opinion page gave fascism its proper due, I think it’s high time I surrender the remainder of my youth to corporate servitude. With any luck, it will feel like mere seconds before I’m coughing up some vital organ on a prime piece of Florida real estate, mumbling unintelligibly while watching my third wife add a hint of arsenic to the morphine drip.
And yet, I can’t help but feeling grateful – things could have been worse. College can take a lot of the fun out of being our age, and I like to think of this column as a therapeutic experience.
But if there’s one convenient topic for a goodbye, it was the sensation, at every point in my long transition from creative writing to economics with an emphasis in math, of having been placed firmly in a new camp that was superior to all others.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been greeted with a disgusted expression when I say I’m studying something with a minimum of analytical content. Conversely, I remember only too well the smugness of hard sciences students who frowned on my constantly changing array of humanities majors several years ago. The conceit is all the more poisonous because it is a lifestyle choice that allows us over the course of four years to isolate ourselves from those with the potential to challenge it.
When I first came to the university, my opinion of analytical study was as cursory as it was pathetic – in a worldview where fiction was the true foundation of all that was good and pure in academia, mathematicians were troglodytes whose definition of beauty was nothing more than a series of irrelevant proofs and classical music in windowless rooms. There was no shortage of people who agreed. And when I began to study economics, I allowed myself to believe it was humanities students who were mired in unjustifiable hero-worship of dead people.
But if we were really serious about holistic education, we would make introductory statistics and calculus 2 mandatory for everyone. Simultaneously, we would enforce a far more rigorous English language requirement. Foreign language credits for studying abroad would be premised on marked improvement in spoken and written language skills after the trip. We would either dispense with the ethnic studies requirement or make it more difficult, so that its coerced attendees leave with something more than a bigger vocabulary with which to castigate 16th century Europeans.
This is not a discussion with any larger ramifications for the future of education in this country – the actual task of redefining the way we learn will be waged in state halls and kindergarten classrooms and by people far more intelligent than myself.
But if we really want to provide an experience that meaningfully changes us, it should be obvious college is quickly becoming a rip-off. Sure, lip service is paid to the idea of a broad education, but that platitude means nothing without the intellectual rigor to enforce it.
Like the many goodbye columns that have preceded it, this one will mean absolutely nothing in the scheme of things. So what the hell – I love this place because I’ve never felt so constantly unprepared, incapable and ready to admit it as I did during Hans Adler’s discussion of what defines the word Kafkaesque, or later, Ananth Seshadri’s many-part series on crowding-out effects. At its best, college can teach us to see elegance in what other people choose to love, and that no endeavor is small or unworthy unless it fails to challenge us to the extent that we deserve.
As for me, and the three people still reading (I love you too, Mom), I had a sort of belated “eureka” moment that nicely tied these fragmented parting thoughts together several weeks ago. I had just finished reviewing a particularly brutal proof and was riding my bike down Observatory Drive, enjoying the wind and wondering how my instructor could have so flawlessly reduced a jumble of symbols and rules to a working model of growth in animal populations. I kept going over those 10 minutes of frenzied scribbling, but the only thing I remembered was how good it felt to be there.
Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in economics.
