_WhatsTheMatterWithCollege_byRickPerlstein _TwoYearsAreBetterThanFour_byLizAddison CB5B7491-CC8E-4AD7-8F02-D7098B636127
What’s the matter with college? By Rick Perlstein
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The New York Times College Essay Contest
What’s the Matter With College?
By Rick Perlstein
When Ronald Reagan ran against Pat Brown in 1966 for the governorship of California, the
defining issue was college. Governor Brown was completing the biggest university expansion in
modern history – nine new campuses. California’s colleges and universities had been instrumental
in turning the nation’s biggest state into the world’s seventh-biggest economy and an international
cultural mecca – and they formed the heart, Brown presumed, of his re-election appeal. Ronald
Reagan’s advisers agreed and sought to neutralize the higher-ed issue by having the actor
announce his candidacy flanked by two Nobel Prize winners. Reagan had other ideas. For
months he told campaign-trail audiences horror stories about the building takeovers, antiwar
demonstrations and sexual orgies ”so vile that I cannot describe it to you” at Berkeley, the
University of California’s flagship campus. Reagan’s advisers warned him that disparaging the
jewel of California civilization was political suicide. The candidate snapped back, ”Look, I don’t
care if I’m in the mountains, the desert, the biggest cities of this state, the first question: ‘What are
you going to do about Berkeley?’ And each time the question itself would get applause.”
It’s unimaginable now that a gubernatorial race in the nation’s largest state would come down to a
debate about what was happening on campus. But it seemed perfectly natural then. The nation
was obsessed with college and college students. It wasn’t just the building takeovers and the
generation gap; the obsession was well in gear by the presidency of John F. Kennedy. (In
October 1961, Harper’s devoted an issue to the subject.) The fascination was rooted in reasons as
fresh as yesterday’s op-ed pages: in an increasingly knowledge-based economy, good colleges
were a social-mobility prerequisite, and between 1957 and 1967, the number of college students
doubled. Reagan actually cast himself as this new class’s savior, asking whether Californians
would allow ”a great university to be brought to its knees by a noisy, dissident minority.” To that,
liberals responded that these communities’ unique ability to tolerate noisy, dissident minorities
was why universities were great.
Now, as then, everyone says higher education is more important than ever to America’s future.
But interesting enough to become a topic of national obsession? Controversial enough to fight a
gubernatorial campaign over? Hardly. The kids do have their own war now, but not much of an
antiwar movement, much less building takeovers. College campuses seem to have lost their
centrality. Why do college and college students no longer lead the culture? Why does student life
no longer seem all that important?
Here’s one answer: College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.
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For nine years I’ve lived in the shadow of the University of Chicago – as an undergraduate
between 1988 and 1992, and again since 2002. After growing up in a suburb that felt like a jail to
me, I found my undergraduate years delightfully noisy and dissident. I got involved with The
Baffler, the journal of social criticism edited by Thomas Frank, who went on to write ”What’s the
Matter With Kansas?”; every Sunday, I trekked down to the neighborhood jazz jam session,
where ’60s continuities were direct. The bass player was a former Maoist, the drummer a former
beatnik.
Early in May I had lunch with the beatnik, Doug Mitchell, who received his undergraduate
degree in 1965 and then went to graduate school here and is now an editor at the University of
Chicago Press. ”I suspect I got in this university primarily because I had a high-school friend
who got a pirated copy of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Capricorn,”’ he said. ”I put that on my
reading list. And the admissions counselor was utterly astonished: ‘How did you get this?’ It was
truly banned in 1960.” He settled into an alienated suburban kid’s paradise. ”We had a social life
that kind of revolved around the dorm lounge, because that’s where everybody hung out after
midnight. And some people got way into it and didn’t survive. They would never go to class.
They would argue night and day in the lounge!”
Mitchell and his friends enhanced their social life with special celebrity guest speakers, lured to
their dorm lounge with little more than chutzpah and a phone call -people like Anais Nin, Eudora
Welty and Ralph Ellison. One kid, a loudmouthed New Yorker (overrepresented at Chicago,
which didn’t have Jewish quotas), confronted Ellison over the latter’s distaste for Charlie Parker.
Mitchell shakes his head in wonder. ”It was extraordinary to see this kind of head-to-head thing
go on practically the first week you showed up on campus. The scrappy kids who were there
wanted to mix it up with whoever came in.” Mitchell’s stories tumbled forth: baiting rednecks by
reciting Lenny Bruce routines; listening to Elaine May and Mike Nichols records (they helped
invent modern sketch comedy at the Compass Theatre two blocks from campus in the 1950s);
the midnight concert students organized in which John Cage shared the bill with Chicago jazz
players. ”We seemed to have boundless verve. I had a friend who said, ‘Why don’t we call Dexter
Gordon and get him to come to our dorm lounge and play?’ Then we called John Coltrane and
said, ‘Would you like to do a concert with Ravi Shankar?’ The point I’m trying to make is that the
adventure of going to college consisted of a kind of freedom that you couldn’t imagine until you
turned 18, you were no longer under adult control and you made your own schedule. This is the
most liberating moment Americans have in life.”
Mitchell was beaming, but his face fell when I told him about my conversation the previous
evening with Hamilton Morris, a New Yorker finishing up his first year of college. His parents
make documentary films. He attended a high school of the arts where ”they sort of let me do
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whatever I wanted.” He is a filmmaker, a painter, a photographer, an experienced professional
stand-up comedian. His life precollege was exceptionally fulfilling, and he expected it to remain
so here at one of the nation’s great universities. Then what happened?
I hated it from the first day,” he told me. ”People here are so insanely uncreative, and they’re
proud of it.” 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 was most harrowing was Hamilton’s matter-of-fact description of a culture of enervation –
”that so many people hate it with a passion and don’t leave.” I heard similar things from several
bright, creative searchers on campus – the kind of people in whom I recognized my own (and
Doug Mitchell’s) 19-year-old self. I sat down with a group of them at the Medici cafe, a campus
fixture for decades, and they described college as a small town they’re eager to escape.
”Everyone I talk to has that kind of feeling in their bones,” Mike Yong, a Japanese literature
major, insisted. ”Even if they’re going into investment banking.” Someone offered the word
”infantilizing.” Murmurs of assent, then the word ”emasculating,” to louder agreement. One even
insisted his process of political, social and creative awakening had happened, yes, during college
– not because of college but in spite of it. Is their diagnosis a function of college itself today, or
just this particular college? Hamilton Morris told me stories that suggest the former. He visited
his adviser and described his frustrations with the university. Her response: ”You’re not meant
for college. You should really drop out.” He struck up a conversation with a student on his floor
”who as far as I can tell doesn’t have any friends at all and nobody talks to him. He has no desire
to transfer – even though he’s unhappy. I feel like a lot of people are like that as well. You know:
‘College sucks anyway, so I might as well stay here.”’
Most of my interviewees were happy. Caroline Ouwerkerk was ecstatically so. As I futzed with
my digital recorder, she gushed, ”I’ll talk all day about the university, whether or not I’m being
recorded!” She gushed about the housing system, which sorts students randomly into teamlike
”houses,” where ”someone is caring for you right from the start.” She gushed about her job with
the university-sponsored Community Service Leadership Training Corps and about her volunteer
work advising prospective students. We met in the spacious lobby of the campus art museum,
where she had already been three times but had yet to see the paintings; she was always there for
a reception or a meeting. I asked if many of her fellow students felt alienated from society, as
many young people did in the 1960s. ”I don’t think anyone really feels that,” she responded. ”I
am so impressed with so many of my peers at the university, with what they’ve accomplished
before they go there in their high-school years, what they’ve accomplished now.” Caroline is
smart. She is passionate. She has a social conscience and a mature grasp of the extraordinary
privileges life has handed her. A reporter slotting her in for an interview also discovers she’s
astonishingly overscheduled – ”Right now it’s probably the worst time to ask me what I do for
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fun!” – but even her fun is impressive: an anthropology major specializing in food culture, she
has been all over the city discovering exotic new ethnic restaurants. Caroline is a pristine
example of what the Times columnist David Brooks called, in a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article on
college, an Organization Kid. She is, indeed, a cog in the organization – specifically, the
bureaucracy that schedules students’ self-exploration, the very facet of campus culture that Mike
Yong and his friends find most ”infantilizing.” Organization Kids don’t mind it.
Most people make their accommodation between the two extremes. Their numbers include,
interestingly enough, most of the campus activists. Jonathan Hirsch is a right-of-center example.
He has been the president of Chicago Friends of Israel, and one of the actions he led was taking
over the Q. and A. session at a panel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the Friends
considered unbalanced. Hirsch is a case study of a phenomenon that wouldn’t have made sense
even to Ronald Reagan in 1966: the saturation of higher education with market thinking. It cuts
against the presumption that the campus should be a place radically apart from the rest of society
– its own ”city-state,” wrote the British poet Stephen Spender in a 1968 essay entirely typical of
the era’s what’s-happening-on-campus genre. A biology major, Hirsch is most passionate about
biotechnology. His ambition is to work for a venture-capital firm. He got excited telling me
about the summer job he had at the University of Chicago’s Office of Intellectual Property and
about sitting on a committee to help set up a university ”biotech incubator, where a new
biotechnology company can be started up.” He also expresses disappointment in Chicago’s
relative lack of market mojo: ”Stanford commercializes a lot of stuff very well. This university
has a lot of stuff that would be great, but we don’t act on it.” I asked whether incentivizing
science according to its marketability might distort the university’s mission to nurture ideas on
the basis of intellectual merit, regardless of commercial potential. He’s a bright kid, but I’m not
sure he understood the question.
Just before these interviews, there had been a wave of campus activism: Chicago was
considering replacing its idiosyncratic Uncommon Application in favor of the so-called Common
Application used by many top-tier schools. ”I love the Uncommon Application,” Hirsch said.
Then he added, ”But at the same time I want the value of my degree to go up.” One thing that the
U.S. News & World Report rankings measure, he explained, is ”selectivity,” and the Uncommon
Application (goes the theory) kills Chicago’s selectivity rate by keeping more people from
applying. Interestingly enough, when I later spoke to a pro-Uncommon Application advocate, his
argument for it was likewise couched in economic terms.
I brought up another goal of campus activists to Jonathan Hirsch: reversing Chicago’s decision,
unique among top-tier universities, not to divest from the military government of Sudan in
protest against the genocide in Darfur. He responded: ”I understand their whole position. But,
well, I’m not going to intrude myself on the investment decisions of the university.” He then
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began a sophisticated critique of the marginal utility – limited, he says – of the divestment
strategy as politics. When I later presented his arguments to a group of Darfur activists, they laid
out their own position in market language: ”In terms of the prevailing trend in corporate social
responsibility, as a large corporation, albeit a university, we want our university to remain
competitive in that respect.”
There is something that these very different students share. Just as the distance between the
campus and the market has shrunk (perhaps not that surprising at Chicago, home of the
market-based approach to almost everything), so has the gap between childhood and college –
and between college and the real world that follows. To me, to Doug Mitchell, to just about
anyone over 30, going to college represented a break, sometimes a radical one – and our
immediate postcollege lives represented a radical break with college. Some of us ended up
coming back to the neighborhood partly for that very fact: nostalgia for four years unlike any we
had experienced or would experience again. Not for these kids.
Hamilton Morris, with his hip, creative parents, is an extreme case of a common phenomenon:
college without the generation gap. (As I write this at a coffee shop near campus, a kid picks up
her cellphone – ”Hi, Dad!” – and chats amiably for 15 minutes. ”When we went to college,” a
dean of students who was a freshman in 1971 tells me, ”you called on Sunday – the obligatory
30-second phone call on the dorm phone – and you hoped not to hear from them for the rest of
the week.”)
Morris is an exaggeration too of another banal new reality. You used to have to go to college to
discover your first independent film, read your first forbidden book, find freaks like yourself who
shared, say, a passion for Lenny Bruce. Now for even the most provincial students, the Internet,
a radically more democratic and diverse culture – and those hip baby-boomer parents – take care
of the problem.
Caroline hopped on a community-service track in high school, continued in college and plans on
a career working in the same kind of service bureaucracy after graduation as she does now.
Jonathan will experience the same sort of continuity – he has embraced a worldview in which
erasing the distinction between the university and the world outside it is the entire point. Some of
these kids, indeed, might end up having more of a ”college” experience when they enter the
workplace than beforehand. The workplace may be more surprising, and maybe even more
creative.
Why aren’t people paying attention to the campuses? Because, as a discrete experience, ”college”
has begun to disappear. My radical, alienated friends brought up the University of Chicago’s
marketing materials: bucolic images of a mystic world apart, where 18-year-olds discover
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themselves for the first time in a heady atmosphere of cultural and intellectual tumult. But
college no longer looks like that. They wondered how long the admissions office thought it could
get away with it before students started complaining they’d been swindled. I posed the question
to a brilliant graduating senior, someone I’ve been friends with for years. ”They’re assuming that
the marketing is for students,” he explained. ”It’s not. It’s for parents.”
Who had, you know, gone to college back when it was college.
Copyright 2007 | The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy
TwoYears Are Better Than Four
SEPTEMBER 26, 2007 12:00 AMSeptember 26, 2007 12:00 am
Liz Addison, 38, is a biology major whose goal is to become a large animal veterinarian. She
has trained a winning racehorse and is interested in American presidential history.
Oh, the hand wringing. “College as America used to understand it is coming to an end,” bemoans
Rick Perlstein and his beatnik friend of fallen face. Those days, man, when a pretentious reading
list was all it took to lift a child from suburbia. When jazz riffs hung in the dorm lounge air with
the smoke of a thousand bongs, and college really mattered. Really mattered?
Rick Perlstein thinks so. It mattered so much to him that he never got over his four years at the
University of Privilege. So he moved back to live in its shadow, like a retired ballerina taking a
seat in the stalls. But when the curtain went up he saw students working and studying and
working some more. Adults before their time. Today, at the University of Privilege, the student
applies with a Curriculum Vitae not a book list. Shudder.
Thus, Mr. Perlstein concludes, the college experience – a rite of passage as it was meant it to be
– must have come to an end. But he is wrong. For Mr. Perlstein, so rooted in his own nostalgia,
is looking for himself – and he would never think to look for himself in the one place left where
the college experience of self-discovery does still matter to those who get there. My guess,
reading between the lines, is that Mr. Perlstein has never set foot in an American community
college.
The philosophy of the community college, and I have been to two of them, is one that
unconditionally allows its students to begin. Just begin. Implicit in this belief is the
understanding that anything and everything is possible. Just follow any one of the 1,655 road
signs, and pop your head inside – yes, they let anyone in – and there you will find discoveries of
a first independent film, a first independent thought, a first independent study. This college
experience remains as it should. This college brochure is not marketing for the parents – because
the parents, nor grandparents, probably never went to college themselves.
Upon entry to my first community college I had but one O’level to my name. These now
disbanded qualifications once marked the transition from lower to upper high school in the Great
British education system. It was customary for the average student to proceed forward with a
clutch of O’levels, say eight or nine. On a score of one, I left school hurriedly at sixteen. Thomas
Jefferson once wrote, “Everybody should have an education proportional to their life.” In my
case, my life became proportional to my education. But, in doing so, it had the good fortune to
land me in an American community college and now, from that priceless springboard, I too seek
admission to the University of Privilege. Enter on empty and leave with a head full of dreams?
How can Mr. Perlstein say college does not matter anymore?
The community college system is America’s hidden public service gem. If I were a candidate for
office I would campaign from every campus. Not to score political points, but simply to make
sure that anyone who is looking to go to college in this country knows where to find one. Just
recently, I read an article in the New York Times describing a ‘college application essay’
workshop for low-income students. I was strangely disturbed that those interviewed made no
mention of community college. Mr Perlstien might have been equally disturbed, for the thrust of
the workshop was no different to that of an essay coach to the affluent. “Make Life Stories
Shine,” beams the headline. Or, in other words, prove yourself worldly, insightful, cultured,
mature, before you get to college.
Yet, down at X.Y.C.C. it is still possible to enter the college experience as a rookie. That is the
understanding – that you will grow up a little bit with your first English class, a bit more with
your first psychology class, a whole lot more with your first biology, physics, chemistry. That
you may shoot through the roof with calculus, philosophy, or genetics. “College is the key,” a
young African-American student writes for the umpteenth torturous revision of his college essay,
“as well as hope.” Oh, I wanted desperately to say, please tell him about community college.
Please tell him that hope can begin with just one placement test.
When Mr. Perlstein and friends say college no longer holds importance, they mourn for both the
individual and society. Yet, arguably, the community college experience is more critical to the
nation than that of former beatnik types who, lest we forget, did not change the world. The
community colleges of America cover this country college by college and community by
community. They offer a network of affordable future, of accessible hope, and an option to
dream. In the cold light of day, is it perhaps not more important to foster students with dreams
rather than a building take-over?
I believe so. I believe the community college system to be one of America’s uniquely great
institutions. I believe it should be celebrated as such. “For those who find it necessary to go to a
two-year college,” begins one University of Privilege admissions paragraph. None too subtle in
its implication, but very true. For some students, from many backgrounds, would never breathe
the college experience if it were not for the community college. Yes, it is here that Mr. Perlstein
will find his college years of self-discovery, and it is here he will find that college does still
matter.
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