The Pen

Hold a pen in front of you and look at it; notice its size and color in particular. Now, slowly move it away until you have your arm fully extended. Notice anything different? Probably not, and that is how it should be. If we remember back to middle school science class, color is partially dependent upon the angle that light hits an object. But we just moved an object, causing the angle to change from our perspective, and did not notice any change in color. The pen also moved further away without any apparent change in size. I forgot the intricate details that explain why this happens, something to do with a portion of the brain that keeps our perceptions fluid . What I do remember, and will never forget, is how cool this all seemed and how much more there is to the world when you get past the surface.

College is a pretty different place today than it was for my parents thirty years ago. Then again, so were the two worlds in which we were raised. Most kids in my generation were not raised in the Sandlot. We did not hang out at the malt shop after school. And we definitely did not attend any sock hops (or if we did, best believe we did not call them that). Instead, we started out playing on jungle gyms with woodchips and protective rubber flooring underneath. Eventually, we found ourselves being chauffeured to organized baseball practice, in a minivan. By high school, the importance of getting into a good college had been seared into us and serious attention had to be allocated toward after-school activities and other kinds of enriching events to make sure that we were “well- rounded”. Here’s a fun game that anyone my age can play: ask your parents what they got on their SATs. If they can, you win! Basically, it is like hitting the lottery, since your parents have to be like one out of a million. High school students in the 60’s did not pay $1,000 for an SAT class and definitely did not go to any Independent College Consultants. As Mr. Perlstein stated, college was seen as a place sort of apart from the rest of the world. Kids went there and were met with new people, ideas, and situations. Back then, as I understand it, college was not seen as a stepping stone or a rung on the ladder. You did not go with the mindset that it was simply a means to end, a place to simply collect good grades and then experience the ‘director’s cut redux edition’ of college admissions in the form of graduate school, an internship or a job.

In the past three years, I have studied in three places that seemingly could not be more different from one another: the University of Miami, the University of Michigan, and Oxford University. Yet, if we leave aside the gorgeous beaches, football teams that can’t seem to ever win the last two games of their season and dreaming spires, in a certain sense, the three colleges really ain’t all that different. On each campus, more or less, I found resources to match my interests that could not have been paralleled in any other type of environment. Whether it was political studies, activism, anthropology, film, or acting, I could find it there. To address Will Hunting’s (Matt Damon, Good Will Hunting), barroom critique, yeah, you can find books about anything you want in a public library. But can you find the people that wrote those books and talk with them? Or much more importantly, can you find a group of kids who share similar interests and discuss those topics with them?

I know that plenty of my friends would read that last sentence and retort that enlightened discussions rarely take place in their classes. They would be right. And this is the problem, summed up neatly. Oh, kids participate and talk in discussion sections and lectures, no doubt about that. But the dark underbelly of many such comments is something called “participation points”, just like in the good old days of naps and snack time. It becomes questionable as to whether these discussions are based on interest in the subject or interest in the grade. One thing that is not in question, though, is the increasing infantilism of college students. Marked attendance, more required classes (for our own well-rounded goodness, of course), and multifaceted grading, including our good friend “participation”, have all played leading roles in this movement. To be fair, a lot of students play right into this and choose not to separate and grow up as quickly as our parents and their parents before them. If there is an issue or threat of any color of seriousness, we can call home on the cheap. No answer? Well, that is why text messaging and instant messaging and email were invented.

If students find college to be a “let down” from their pre- college lives, then the fault lies squarely on their shoulders. Instead of chasing grades and resume building positions, chase down an eminent professor during his office hours. Instead of Facebook, get outside of your bubble and try meeting more of the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of kids at your school, see what happens. University campuses continue to be unique places in our country. No, they are not the utopias they once were (or at least that we created through rose colored lenses and advertising campaigns). But we should remember that colleges have served different functions, as was necessary, at different times in history. A short sampling could show colleges as revolution incubators, a way to avoid getting drafted, religious havens and persecutions. Nevertheless, in all of these forms, universities, by nature, have always provided the opportunity for a students to better themselves.

Going back to our magic pen, I learned about it in a seemingly typical mid-week morning lecture. It was a dark, cold, windy, and snowy Michigan morning but I showed up and was rewarded by this particular lecture and discussion. It changed the way that I thought about, and continue to think about, certain aspects of perception and reality. Every class is not going to have that effect, true, but on that day, for me, it did. I do not see how this could happen anywhere else because there is no other place, that I know of, where people can go to have learning and self-improvement be the central (and sole) focus of their experience. As demonstrated by the pen, even the most basic action has infinite layers of deeper meaning. Think, if that’s just moving a pen, what more can a person learn about other, more complex events like, say World War II or the reduction of carboxylic acids? Our system is great in that, most schools allow students to explore, at least for their first couple of years. Whether or not we take advantage of this offer is entirely our responsibility.

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