Poor Jon, they mocked him and spelled his name wrong. Even more unfortunately, there was another Jon Hersh whose name was spelled that way.
Also, I find myself nearly weeping for poor doubly surnamed Hamilton Morris. "His fellow students 'had to spend their entire high school experience studying for the SATs or something and didn't really get a chance to live life or experience things.'" What an injustice for him that everyone's parents can't be documentary filmmakers and send their children to arts schools where they "do whatever they want," which is evidently what "experiencing things" and "living life" consists in. The author leaves us to wonder though if it's his fellow students that Mr. Morris is disappointed in, or the fact that the U of C curriculum frequently requires him to do things he may not want, thereby preventing him from further experiencing his lived life.
As to whether college is more like the world outside of college, I'm not yet in a position to tell. (However, in my post-college "real life," I do attend highly U of C-saturated events like this, which are not too different from college, including even the baiting with free food.) My hum professor once told me that he thought college was becoming more like high school in some of the respects that Perlstein emphasizes--its careerism and "tracking" that begins in high school and goes uninterrupted straight through the university, the way that high school expectations about grades and awards and other bureaucratic pats on the head carry over more and more into college, and so on. Maybe that's true to some extent. I don't feel compelled anymore to defend Chicago against accusations that it's a killjoy kind of place.
But I think Perlstein is exaggerating the unrestrained joys of the college experience of yore, and assuming a little too much by suggesting that a period of experimentation with radicalism of some kind is, you know, an integral developmental phase in every well-lived life. Isn't it a little absurd to instruct people to become Maoists in order to eventually reject Maoism, and call the charade "growing up"? Also, it's not that college students today lack the courage or curiosity to invite Ralph Ellison to speak in their dorm lounges--it's that the Ralph Ellisons of the world tend not to be easily reachable by phone, and they charge $30,000 honoraria when you do get to them, so unless Mr. Perlstein would like to personally subsidize the courage and curiosity of present-day college students, it's looking like a no-go.
Update: Phoebe has more thoughts on this.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
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6 comments:
Well, back in the years 1967-71, when I was the College at UC, something like half of each class dropped out, and joy was not the word most people--even those of us who stayed--would have picked first for our experience. I enjoyed most things, from my mostly excellent courses to the lively theatrical culture, but lots of my friends hated the place because it was overly academic, competitive, infantilizing, Eurocentric, less free than the alternative high schools they had attended . . . It's certainly a very different now place, as is to be expected--but some of the bitching sounds strikingly familiar.
I think this article inadvertently taps into a debate that is really more unique to the U of C than other selective schools. Chicago is still in the midst of a switch from being a “lounge crowd” school to one of “organization kids,” a transition that appears to have happened long ago at places like Princeton, Berkeley, MIT, etcetera. I think ultimately what is driving so much of the acrimony over changes in the college is that the former group sees their days are numbered. While my sentiments are with the later, I cannot blame a large body of students for being very distrustful of Zimmer. He clearly is hoping to finish the task on his watch.
I think hum iii is spot on. Though I wouldn't call myself a "lounge" person, I'm equally reticent to join the other side. It will be a sad day when the UofC is finally devolves into nothing more than a Midwestern Ivy aspirer. Ironically, it will probably be their most lucrative day as well.
Rita, I despised losers like Rickie when I was in college. They sat around braying about ideas that were either obvious or wrong, dazzled by their own brilliance (instead of being embarrassed by their stupidity for not having had, and gotten over, these ideas years earlier). I'm sure that it was a "heady" experience for someone like R.P., finding a group of people that would let him talk sometimes, instead of giving him wedgies and locking him in the janitor's closet. Sadly, he hasn't learned enough about himself to realize that his reaction wasn't about "deep ideas", but about finally being part of a group picking fleas off of each other. (And many of these people could have used that service literally.)
It was pointed out to me too that Perlstein doesn't even mention classes--his own or those of the students he interviews. He seems to assume that the good university just uses classes and the whole framework of institutional education as a facade to attract students who then receive their "real" educations debating the merits of Leninism versus Trotskyism in the dorm lounges. I think it's a telling omission--much of what I gained from college came from my classes too, and from other more or less organized things--lectures, the house system, extracurricular activities, and so on--but since these are all indicative of the school's success as an institution and not the products of isolated, spontaneous self-discovery, Perlstein doesn't seem to think they merit much praise. He's even down on the girl involved in community service because she's part of the "service bureaucracy"...instead of what? Marching around the neighborhood and grabbing random kids off the street in order to sit them down and tutor them?
There was an essay in the Chronicle recently about the demise of Antioch College that illustrated almost precisely that kind of anti-institutional free-for-all educational philosophy, and how ultimately meaningless the idea is. Its author strikes me as sympathetic to Perlstein--he also suggests that, back when his generation was using college to flirt with radical politics, it was innocent and in good faith, but these kids have just taken the whole thing too far. It seems to me though that they've just taken it to its logical conclusion by completely destroying the institution that everyone agreed was a barrier to authentic self-exploration from the start.
I don't really think there is a yawning chasm between "lounge committees" (the Tom Wolfe term that applies to Michelson's Latin speakers--it's a long story) and "organization kids." It's not as though there are only two types of students--those who live only for the unadulterated pleasures of lounge discussion, and those who shun it entirely in favor of pursuing their dreams of i-banking glory. You can usually tell who in your classes has interesting ideas and is interested in ideas, and those people tend to be spread across Perlstein's "creative types" as well as those he seems to dismiss as "cogs of the organization."
I think there is a much bigger gap at Chicago on the extremes than there is at other schools, and that is a big problem. Some people who populate the "lounge committees" honestly cause me to question if they should be at any college, rather than simply reading books for free at their local Barnes in Noble cafe en route to their future barista job (when all goes to hell for them, as it inevitably does). Alternatively, the admissions committee made a pretty poor choice in deciding to compensate for this group by expanding the future-fraternity-member component of the admitted student body. Of the many institutions that the school should consider modeling itself after, Duke is not one of them. Solidly balanced students are a dime a dozen, and it is hard for me to see why Chicago does not go after them as aggressively as its peers.
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