CSotD: Graduation Day in the Committee Room
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The second Saturday in May would be graduation on a lot of campuses, and it probably still is, since the ones without problems haven’t made the news.
Jeff Stahler (AMS) leads off today because he states the basic issue plainly.
But I need to start with a disclaimer: I skipped my graduation ceremony, because I had taken a year off, so I wasn’t graduating with my class, I had a pregnant wife, and we needed to get rolling with adult life.
I didn’t really give a damn about the ceremony anyway, but I was a third-generation college graduate.
I understand, with the wisdom of age, that the ceremony matters a great deal to both the students and parents for whom it is a family first. It’s not that I was missed among the roughly 1,750 who graduated that day, but I have to avoid being snotty about people who wanted to be there this time around.
As seen in La Cucaracha (AMS), they were robbed, and not just robbed but robbed twice, because their college experience had already been truncated by Covid.
If there were ever a good time to take a gap year or two, it was during the pandemic. The idea that spending a year in your dorm room constituted “going to college” is a tribute to people who mistake the university for a job-training center.
After all, you could have taken Zoom classes from home and saved a bundle. The critical point is that my learning in college was a 50/50 split between the classroom and the rest of the experience, and that’s being very generous to the academic side.
We discussed John Locke and Plato in class, but we applied those concepts to real life in the arguments and conversations outside the classroom. Plus we had four years of growing up amid a thoughtful peer group.
Even students who spent hours working jobs in the library or dininghall, and commuters who went home at the end of the day, got a solid dose of this out-of-classroom advantage.
Patrick Chappatte is correct that those who once demonstrated against the war in Vietnam are now champions of free speech on campus.
But it is a common historical error to assume that the zeitgeist of a moment is a full picture of the time, and, just as not every college student today was camped out on the quad, not every college student of the 60s opposed the war.
We had our “briefcase bourgeoisie” who, a generation later, were personified by Alex P. Keaton, and rightwing thugs who sneered at and sometimes attacked long-haired students.
Nor were most activists obsessed with the fight for social justice and suchlike. Politicos and freaks alike spent plenty of effort attempting to work out personal experiences of romance and learning to play the guitar.
I also recall putting a lot of time into the books, and that was just me, who graduated, in the words of Shannon Sharpe, “magna cum thank you laude.”
All of which emphasizes Chappatte’s contention that we weren’t so different from the students of today.
However, the world is different and colleges are of this world.
Barry Blitt’s cover for the upcoming New Yorker demonstrates a critical difference. There were some college leaders like S.I. Hayakawa who prided themselves on playing tough-guy, but it seemed there were more Theodore Hesburghs and Kingman Brewsters who led with the understanding that contentious debate was often part of the learning process.
The intervention of outside police was rare. Most college presidents not only hesitated to call them in but would resist political efforts to militarize the campus.
However, Bob Englehart has it right: Those old-school college presidents didn’t have to worry about being pilloried by congressional committees and fired by their trustees for not being the rightwing equivalent of “politically correct.”
Those who survive today will be those educators who teach the lesson that, “If you want to get along, you have to go along.”
Lord knows, Drew Sheneman (Tribune) paints an accurate picture of the current-day ruling mood. If future historians judge our times by the zeitgeist of the moment, it may well be a picture of hypocritical judgment and selective repression.
Though it won’t seem to have been either hypocritical or selective in retrospect, if the next elections cement it into place as the norm.
And, however things turn out in November, the dragon’s teeth have been sown.
JFK called a generation to public service, and reaction to his assassination brought about a lowering of violence on TV shows and a ban on mail-order firearms.
I don’t want to see what horror might produce enough revulsion to reverse the societal division that has since been unleashed. We argued over Kent State, and then Sandy Hook didn’t make a dent.
Juxtaposition of the Day
My first impression of Bramhall’s piece was that nobody in the real world cares what you did in college, though they may want to know you graduated. I was asked about my grades once, when I applied to take a Civil Service test. My extra-curricular behavior never came up.
Then again, I just needed to pay rent and groceries while I became the next JD Salinger. I didn’t want to work in some up-tight corporate dystopia, and my advice to current grads would be not to work for jackasses.
But I didn’t graduate with a five-figure student loan debt into a world where “affordable” studio apartments are $1800 a month.
I still don’t think you should kowtow to corporate fascism, and I suspect the kids in the tents feel the same.
But I wonder if they’re going to be able to get by after graduation by making pizzas or selling vacuum cleaners.
I wasn’t sure whether I should start with this Francis or end with it, but here we are, and Gabby and Leo lay out the situation quite well. Righteousness matters, but comes with a cost.
I hope the kids in the tents feel the satisfaction of having done what they must, but it reinforces both my advice that everyone should take a gap year or two before committing to higher education, and my support for a program similar to the GI Bill, exchanging scholarships for public service.
Much depends on November.
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