爱华网CollegePressuresbyWilliamZinsser zinsser
College PressuresWilliam Zinsser
Dear Carlos: I desperately need a dean’sexcuse for my chem. midterm, which will begin in about one hour.All I can say is that I totally blew it this week. I’ve fallenincredibly, inconceivably behind.
Carlos: Help! I am anxious to hear fromyou. I’ll be in my room and won’t leave it until I hear from you.【】Tomorrow is the last day for…
Carlos: I left town because I startedbugging out again. I stayed up all night to finish a take-homemake-up exam and am typing it to hand in on the tenth. It was dueon the fifth. PS: I’m going to the dentist. Pain is prettybad.
Carlos: Probably by Friday I’ll be ableto get back to my studies. Right now, I’m going to take a longwalk. This whole thing has taken a lot out of me.
Carlos: I’m really up the proverbialcreek. The problem is I really bombed the history final. Since Ineed that course for my major I…
Carlos: Here follows a tale of woe. Iwent home this weekend, had to help my Mom, and caught a fever sodidn’t have much time to study. My professor…
Carlos: Aargh! Trouble. Nothing originalbut everything’s piling up at once. To be brief, my jobinterview….
Hey Carlos, good news! I’ve gotmononucleosis!
Who are these wretched supplicants,scribbling notes so laden with anxiety, seeking such miracles ofpostponement and balm? They are men and women who belong toBranford College, one of the twelve residential colleges at YaleUniversity, and the messages are just a few of the hundreds theyleft for their dean, Carlos Hortas - often slipped under his doorat 4 a.m. - last year.
But students like the ones who wrotethose notes can also be found on campuses from coast to coast -especially in New England and many other private colleges acrossthe country that have high academic standards and highly motivatedstudents. Nobody could doubt that the notes are real. In theirurgency and their gallows humor they are authentic voices of ageneration that is panicky to succeed.
My own connection with the messagewriters is that I am master of Branford College. I live in itsGothic quadrangle and know the students well. (We have 485 ofthem.) I am privy to their hopes and fears - and also their stereomusic and their piercing cries in the dead of night (“Does anybodyca-a-are?”). If they went to Carlos to ask how to get throughtomorrow, they come to me to ask how to get through the rest oftheir lives.
Mainly I try to remind them that the roadahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turnsthat they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs,change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They do notwant to hear such liberating news. They want a map - right now -that they can follow unswerving to career security, financialsecurity, social security and, presumably, a prepaidgrave.
What I wish for all students is somerelease from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance tosavor each segment of their education as an experience in itselfand not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them theright to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is asinstructive as victory and is not the end of theworld.
My wish, of course, is naïve. One of thefew rights that America does not proclaim is the right to fail.Achievement is the national god, venerated in our media – themillion-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive – and glorified inour praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent statereligion, the young are growing up old.
I see four kinds of pressure working oncollege students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peerpressure, and self-induced pressure. It's easy to look around forbad guys — to blame the colleges for charging too much money, theprofessors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushingtheir children too far, the students for driving themselves toohard. But there are no bad guys, only victims.
“In the late 1960s,” one dean told me,“the typical question that I got from students was ‘Why is there somuch suffering in the world?’ or ‘How can I make a contribution?’Today it’s ‘Do you think it would look better for getting into lowschool if I did a double major in history and political science, orjust majored in one of them?’ ” Many other deans confirmed thispattern. One said: “They’re trying to find an edge – the intangiblesomething that will look better on paper if two students are aboutequal.”
Note the emphasis on looking better. Thetranscript has become a sacred document, the passport to security.How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears inperson. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, inYale's official system of grading, A means "excellent" and B means"very good". Today, looking very good is no longer good enough,especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medicalschool. They know that entrance into the better schools will be anentrance into the better law firms and better medical practiceswhere they will make a lot of money. They also know that the oddsare harsh. Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170 studentsfrom an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of7,000.
It’s all very well for those of us whowrite letters of recommendation for our students to stress thequalities of humanity that will make them food lawyers or doctors.And it’s nice to think that admission officers are really readingour letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment orconcern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualizethese officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with As thatthey regard a B as positively shameful.
The pressure is almost as heavy onstudents who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are thedays of the “gentleman’s C”, when students journeyed throughcollege with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety ofcourses - music, art, philosophy, classics, anthropology, poetry,religion - that would send them out as liberally educated men andwomen. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates whohave this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safesubjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiringminds exhilarate me. I like to hear the play of their ideas. Idon't know if they are getting As or Cs, and I don't care. I alsolike them as people. The country needs them, and they will findsatisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They can't.
Nor can I blame them. They live in abrutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at most private collegenow comes to at least $ 7,000, not counting books and fees. Thismight seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But theyare equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60 percentof what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remaindercomers from what colleges receive in endowments, grants, and gifts.Now the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs – higherevery year – of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up.Insurance is up. We are witnessing in America the creation of abrotherhood of paupers – colleges, parents, and students, joined bythe common bond of debt.
Today it is not unusual for a student,even if he works part time at college and full time during thesummer, to accrue $ 5,000 in loans after four years - loans that hemust start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted atcommencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as hegoes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout collegeto prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used “he”,incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no lesspressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, theirparents, and society. In fact, they re probably under morepressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped tobring fresh leadership to traditionally male job, society hasn’tyet caught up with this fact.
Along with economic pressure goesparental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeplyintertwined.
I see many students taking pre-medicalcourses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if theywere going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them inother corners of their life as cheerful people.
“Do you want to go to medical school?” Iask them.
“I guess so,” they say, withoutconviction, or “Not really.”
“Then why are you going?”
“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor.They’re paying all this money and...”
Poor students, poor parents. They arecaught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. Theparents mean well; they are trying to steer their sons anddaughters toward a secure future. But, the sons and daughters wantto major in history or classics or philosophy - subjects with no‘practical’ value. Where is the payoff on the humanities? It is noteasy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do,indeed, pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studyingsubjects such as history and classics - and ability to synthesizeand relate, to weigh the cause and effect, to see events inperspective - are just the faculties that make creative leaders inbusiness or almost any general field. Still, many parents wouldrather put their money on courses that point toward a specificprofession - courses that are pre-law, pre-med., pre-business, oras I sometimes heard it put, ‘pre-rich’.
But, the pressure on students is severe.They are truly torn. One part of them feels obligated to fulfilltheir parents’ expectations; after all, their parents are older andpresumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectationsthat are right for their parents are not right forthem.
I know a student who wants to be anartist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one -she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she isgrowing as a well-rounded person and taking humanistic subjectsthat will enrich the inner resources out of which her art willgrow. But her father is strongly opposed. He thinks that an artistis a ‘dumb’ thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to pleaseeverybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takessome of the ‘dumb’ courses her father wants her to take - at leastthat are dumb courses for her. She is a free spirit on a campus oftense students - no small achievement in itself - and she deservesto follow her muse.
Peer pressure and self-induced pressureare also intertwined, and they start almost at the beginning offreshman year.
“I had a freshman student I’ll callLinda,” one dean told me. “Who came in and said she was underterrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighterand studied all the time. I couldn’t tell her that Barbara had comein two hours earlier to say the same thing aboutLinda.”
The story is almost funny - except thatit is not. It is symptomatic of all the pressures put together.When every student thinks every other student is working harder anddoing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I seestudents going off to the library every night after dinner andcoming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimesforget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clack oftypewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in theireyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: “Will I geteverything done?”
Probably they will not. They will getsick. They will get ‘blocked’. They will sleep. They willoversleep. They still bug out. Hey Carlos, HELP!
Part of the problem is that they do morethan they are expected to. A professor will assign a five-pagepaper. Several students will start writing ten page papers toimpress him. Then more students will write ten page papers, and afew will raise the ante to fifteen. Pity the poor student who isstill just doing the assignment.
“Once you have twenty or thirty percentof the student population deliberately overexerting,” one deanpoints out, “It’s bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more andmore effort from his class, the student who is doing normal workcan be perceived as not doing well. The tactic works,psychologically.”
Why can’t the professor just cut back andnot accept longer paper? He can, and he probably will. But by thenterm will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highlycontagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor’s mainconcern is with his course. He knows his students only in relationto the course and does not know that they are also overexerting intheir other courses. Not that it is really his business. He did notsign up for dealing with the students as a whole person and withall the emotional baggage the student brought along from home. Thatis what deans, masters chaplains, and psychiatrists arefor.
To some extent this is nothing new: acertain number of professors have always been self-containedislands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with booksthan with people. But the new pauperism has widened the gap stillfurther, for professors who actually like to spend time withstudents do not have as much time to spend. They are alsooverexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish inorder not to perish, hanging by their fingernails onto a shrinkingprofession. If they are old and tenured, they are buried under theduties of administering departments - as departmental chairmen ormembers of committees - which have been thinned out by thebudgetary ax.
Ultimately, it will be the students’ ownbusiness to break the circles in which they are trapped. They aretoo young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and theirclassmates’ fears. They must be jolted into believing in themselvesas unique men and women who have the power to shape their ownfuture.
“Violence is being done to theundergraduate experience,” says Carlos Horta. “College should beopen-ended; at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead,students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choicesnarrow as they go along.”
It is almost as if they think that thecountry has been codified in the types of jobs that exist - thatthey have got to fit into certain slots. Therefore, fit into thebest paying slots.
“They ought to take chances. Not takingchances will lead to a life of colorless mediocrity. They’ll becomfortable. But something in the spirit will bemissing.”
I have painted too drab a portrait oftoday’s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is only halfof their story: If they were so dreary, I would not so thoroughlyenjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like.They are quick to laugh and offer friendship. They are notintroverts. They are usually kind and are more considerate of oneanother that any student generation I have known. Nor are they soobsessed with their studies that they avoid sports andextra-curricular activities. On the contrary, they juggle theircrowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musicaland dramatic groups, and write for campus publications. But this inturn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices.Academically, they have 1300 courses to select from: outside classthey have to decide how much spare time they can spare and how tospend it.
This means that they engage in fewerextracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did. If they wantto row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminateone, in the ‘60s they would have done both. They are tending tochoose activities that are self-limiting. Drama, for instance, isflourishing in all twelve of Yale’s residential colleges, as itnever has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions -as actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians - with adedication to create the best possible play, knowing the day willcome when the run will end and they can get back to theirstudies.
They also cannot afford to be the willingslaves of organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring theone hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper, whose past chairsinclude such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, KingmanBrewster, and William F. Buckley, Jr. much was made of the factthat the editorial staff used to be small and totally committed andthat ‘newsies’ routinely worked fifty hours a week. In effect, theybelonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at Yale.Today’s students will write one or two articles a week, when he orshe can, and is defined as a student. I have never heard the wordnewsie except at the banquet.
If I have described the modernundergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largelyignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out andplay, it is because that is where the crunch is, not only at Yale,but throughout American education. It is why I think we should allbe worried about the values that are nurturing a generation sofearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age. I tellstudents that there is no one ‘right’ way to get ahead - that eachof them is a different person, starting from a different point andbound for a different destination. I tell them that change is atonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiersclosed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and womenwho have achieved success outside the academic world to come andtalk informally with my students during the year. They are theheads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines,politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders,business executives, Broadway producers, artists, writers,economists, photographers, scientists, historians - a mixed bag ofachievers.
I ask them to say a few words about howthey got started. The students assume that they started in theirpresent profession and knew all along that it was what they wantedto do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by acircuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. Thestudents are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career thatwas not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand ofGod or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.WilliamZinsserCollege Pressures
Dear Carlos: I desperately need a dean’sexcuse for my chem. midterm, which will begin in about one hour.All I can say is that I totally blew it this week. I’ve fallenincredibly, inconceivably behind.
Carlos: Help! I am anxious to hear fromyou. I’ll be in my room and won’t leave it until I hear from you.Tomorrow is the last day for…
Carlos: I left town because I startedbugging out again. I stayed up all night to finish a take-homemake-up exam and am typing it to hand in on the tenth. It was dueon the fifth. PS: I’m going to the dentist. Pain is prettybad.
Carlos: Probably by Friday I’ll be ableto get back to my studies. Right now, I’m going to take a longwalk. This whole thing has taken a lot out of me.
Carlos: I’m really up the proverbialcreek. The problem is I really bombed the history final. Since Ineed that course for my major I…
Carlos: Here follows a tale of woe. Iwent home this weekend, had to help my Mom, and caught a fever sodidn’t have much time to study. My professor…
Carlos: Aargh! Trouble. Nothing originalbut everything’s piling up at once. To be brief, my jobinterview….William ZinsserCollege Pressures
Dear Carlos: I desperately need a dean’sexcuse for my chem. midterm, which will begin in about one hour.All I can say is that I totally blew it this week. I’ve fallenincredibly, inconceivably behind.
Carlos: Help! I am anxious to hear fromyou. I’ll be in my room and won’t leave it until I hear from you.Tomorrow is the last day for…
Carlos: I left town because I startedbugging out again. I stayed up all night to finish a take-homemake-up exam and am typing it to hand in on the tenth. It was dueon the fifth. PS: I’m going to the dentist. Pain is prettybad.
Carlos: Probably by Friday I’ll be ableto get back to my studies. Right now, I’m going to take a longwalk. This whole thing has taken a lot out of me.
Carlos: I’m really up the proverbialcreek. The problem is I really bombed the history final. Since Ineed that course for my major I…
Carlos: Here follows a tale of woe. Iwent home this weekend, had to help my Mom, and caught a fever sodidn’t have much time to study. My professor…
Carlos: Aargh! Trouble. Nothing originalbut everything’s piling up at once. To be brief, my jobinterview….
Hey Carlos, good news! I’ve gotmononucleosis!
Who are these wretched supplicants,scribbling notes so laden with anxiety, seeking such miracles ofpostponement and balm? They are men and women who belong toBranford College, one of the twelve residential colleges at YaleUniversity, and the messages are just a few of the hundreds theyleft for their dean, Carlos Hortas - often slipped under his doorat 4 a.m. - last year.
But students like the ones who wrotethose notes can also be found on campuses from coast to coast -especially in New England and many other private colleges acrossthe country that have high academic standards and highly motivatedstudents. Nobody could doubt that the notes are real. In theirurgency and their gallows humor they are authentic voices of ageneration that is panicky to succeed.
My own connection with the messagewriters is that I am master of Branford College. I live in itsGothic quadrangle and know the students well. (We have 485 ofthem.) I am privy to their hopes and fears - and also their stereomusic and their piercing cries in the dead of night (“Does anybodyca-a-are?”). If they went to Carlos to ask how to get throughtomorrow, they come to me to ask how to get through the rest oftheir lives.
Mainly I try to remind them that the roadahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turnsthat they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs,change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They do notwant to hear such liberating news. They want a map - right now -that they can follow unswerving to career security, financialsecurity, social security and, presumably, a prepaidgrave.
What I wish for all students is somerelease from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance tosavor each segment of their education as an experience in itselfand not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them theright to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is asinstructive as victory and is not the end of theworld.
My wish, of course, is naïve. One of thefew rights that America does not proclaim is the right to fail.Achievement is the national god, venerated in our media – themillion-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive – and glorified inour praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent statereligion, the young are growing up old.
I see four kinds of pressure working oncollege students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peerpressure, and self-induced pressure. It's easy to look around forbad guys — to blame the colleges for charging too much money, theprofessors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushingtheir children too far, the students for driving themselves toohard. But there are no bad guys, only victims.
“In the late 1960s,” one dean told me,“the typical question that I got from students was ‘Why is there somuch suffering in the world?’ or ‘How can I make a contribution?’Today it’s ‘Do you think it would look better for getting into lowschool if I did a double major in history and political science, orjust majored in one of them?’ ” Many other deans confirmed thispattern. One said: “They’re trying to find an edge – the intangiblesomething that will look better on paper if two students are aboutequal.”
Note the emphasis on looking better. Thetranscript has become a sacred document, the passport to security.How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears inperson. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, inYale's official system of grading, A means "excellent" and B means"very good". Today, looking very good is no longer good enough,especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medicalschool. They know that entrance into the better schools will be anentrance into the better law firms and better medical practiceswhere they will make a lot of money. They also know that the oddsare harsh. Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170 studentsfrom an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of7,000.
It’s all very well for those of us whowrite letters of recommendation for our students to stress thequalities of humanity that will make them food lawyers or doctors.And it’s nice to think that admission officers are really readingour letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment orconcern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualizethese officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with As thatthey regard a B as positively shameful.
The pressure is almost as heavy onstudents who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are thedays of the “gentleman’s C”, when students journeyed throughcollege with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety ofcourses - music, art, philosophy, classics, anthropology, poetry,religion - that would send them out as liberally educated men andwomen. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates whohave this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safesubjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiringminds exhilarate me. I like to hear the play of their ideas. Idon't know if they are getting As or Cs, and I don't care. I alsolike them as people. The country needs them, and they will findsatisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They can't.
Nor can I blame them. They live in abrutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at most private collegenow comes to at least $ 7,000, not counting books and fees. Thismight seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But theyare equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60 percentof what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remaindercomers from what colleges receive in endowments, grants, and gifts.Now the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs – higherevery year – of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up.Insurance is up. We are witnessing in America the creation of abrotherhood of paupers – colleges, parents, and students, joined bythe common bond of debt.
Today it is not unusual for a student,even if he works part time at college and full time during thesummer, to accrue $ 5,000 in loans after four years - loans that hemust start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted atcommencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as hegoes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout collegeto prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used “he”,incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no lesspressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, theirparents, and society. In fact, they re probably under morepressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped tobring fresh leadership to traditionally male job, society hasn’tyet caught up with this fact.
Along with economic pressure goesparental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeplyintertwined.
I see many students taking pre-medicalcourses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if theywere going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them inother corners of their life as cheerful people.
“Do you want to go to medical school?” Iask them.
“I guess so,” they say, withoutconviction, or “Not really.”
“Then why are you going?”
“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor.They’re paying all this money and...”
Poor students, poor parents. They arecaught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. Theparents mean well; they are trying to steer their sons anddaughters toward a secure future. But, the sons and daughters wantto major in history or classics or philosophy - subjects with no‘practical’ value. Where is the payoff on the humanities? It is noteasy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do,indeed, pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studyingsubjects such as history and classics - and ability to synthesizeand relate, to weigh the cause and effect, to see events inperspective - are just the faculties that make creative leaders inbusiness or almost any general field. Still, many parents wouldrather put their money on courses that point toward a specificprofession - courses that are pre-law, pre-med., pre-business, oras I sometimes heard it put, ‘pre-rich’.
But, the pressure on students is severe.They are truly torn. One part of them feels obligated to fulfilltheir parents’ expectations; after all, their parents are older andpresumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectationsthat are right for their parents are not right forthem.
I know a student who wants to be anartist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one -she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she isgrowing as a well-rounded person and taking humanistic subjectsthat will enrich the inner resources out of which her art willgrow. But her father is strongly opposed. He thinks that an artistis a ‘dumb’ thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to pleaseeverybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takessome of the ‘dumb’ courses her father wants her to take - at leastthat are dumb courses for her. She is a free spirit on a campus oftense students - no small achievement in itself - and she deservesto follow her muse.
Peer pressure and self-induced pressureare also intertwined, and they start almost at the beginning offreshman year.
“I had a freshman student I’ll callLinda,” one dean told me. “Who came in and said she was underterrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighterand studied all the time. I couldn’t tell her that Barbara had comein two hours earlier to say the same thing aboutLinda.”
The story is almost funny - except thatit is not. It is symptomatic of all the pressures put together.When every student thinks every other student is working harder anddoing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I seestudents going off to the library every night after dinner andcoming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimesforget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clack oftypewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in theireyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: “Will I geteverything done?”
Probably they will not. They will getsick. They will get ‘blocked’. They will sleep. They willoversleep. They still bug out. Hey Carlos, HELP!
Part of the problem is that they do morethan they are expected to. A professor will assign a five-pagepaper. Several students will start writing ten page papers toimpress him. Then more students will write ten page papers, and afew will raise the ante to fifteen. Pity the poor student who isstill just doing the assignment.
“Once you have twenty or thirty percentof the student population deliberately overexerting,” one deanpoints out, “It’s bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more andmore effort from his class, the student who is doing normal workcan be perceived as not doing well. The tactic works,psychologically.”
Why can’t the professor just cut back andnot accept longer paper? He can, and he probably will. But by thenterm will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highlycontagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor’s mainconcern is with his course. He knows his students only in relationto the course and does not know that they are also overexerting intheir other courses. Not that it is really his business. He did notsign up for dealing with the students as a whole person and withall the emotional baggage the student brought along from home. Thatis what deans, masters chaplains, and psychiatrists arefor.
To some extent this is nothing new: acertain number of professors have always been self-containedislands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with booksthan with people. But the new pauperism has widened the gap stillfurther, for professors who actually like to spend time withstudents do not have as much time to spend. They are alsooverexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish inorder not to perish, hanging by their fingernails onto a shrinkingprofession. If they are old and tenured, they are buried under theduties of administering departments - as departmental chairmen ormembers of committees - which have been thinned out by thebudgetary ax.
Ultimately, it will be the students’ ownbusiness to break the circles in which they are trapped. They aretoo young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and theirclassmates’ fears. They must be jolted into believing in themselvesas unique men and women who have the power to shape their ownfuture.
“Violence is being done to theundergraduate experience,” says Carlos Horta. “College should beopen-ended; at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead,students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choicesnarrow as they go along.”
It is almost as if they think that thecountry has been codified in the types of jobs that exist - thatthey have got to fit into certain slots. Therefore, fit into thebest paying slots.
“They ought to take chances. Not takingchances will lead to a life of colorless mediocrity. They’ll becomfortable. But something in the spirit will bemissing.”
I have painted too drab a portrait oftoday’s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is only halfof their story: If they were so dreary, I would not so thoroughlyenjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like.They are quick to laugh and offer friendship. They are notintroverts. They are usually kind and are more considerate of oneanother that any student generation I have known. Nor are they soobsessed with their studies that they avoid sports andextra-curricular activities. On the contrary, they juggle theircrowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musicaland dramatic groups, and write for campus publications. But this inturn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices.Academically, they have 1300 courses to select from: outside classthey have to decide how much spare time they can spare and how tospend it.
This means that they engage in fewerextracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did. If they wantto row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminateone, in the ‘60s they would have done both. They are tending tochoose activities that are self-limiting. Drama, for instance, isflourishing in all twelve of Yale’s residential colleges, as itnever has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions -as actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians - with adedication to create the best possible play, knowing the day willcome when the run will end and they can get back to theirstudies.
They also cannot afford to be the willingslaves of organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring theone hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper, whose past chairsinclude such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, KingmanBrewster, and William F. Buckley, Jr. much was made of the factthat the editorial staff used to be small and totally committed andthat ‘newsies’ routinely worked fifty hours a week. In effect, theybelonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at Yale.Today’s students will write one or two articles a week, when he orshe can, and is defined as a student. I have never heard the wordnewsie except at the banquet.
If I have described the modernundergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largelyignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out andplay, it is because that is where the crunch is, not only at Yale,but throughout American education. It is why I think we should allbe worried about the values that are nurturing a generation sofearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age. I tellstudents that there is no one ‘right’ way to get ahead - that eachof them is a different person, starting from a different point andbound for a different destination. I tell them that change is atonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiersclosed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and womenwho have achieved success outside the academic world to come andtalk informally with my students during the year. They are theheads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines,politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders,business executives, Broadway producers, artists, writers,economists, photographers, scientists, historians - a mixed bag ofachievers.
I ask them to say a few words about howthey got started. The students assume that they started in theirpresent profession and knew all along that it was what they wantedto do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by acircuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. Thestudents are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career thatwas not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand ofGod or chance to nudge them down some unforeseentrail.
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