By Tom Robotham
Recently in a public speaking course that I teach, a student delivered a talk titled, “How to Have a Great College Experience.” Among her tips: “Never go to class.”
“Nothing ever happens in classrooms,” she said, “and the actual work is all online anyway.”
I appreciated her honesty, if nothing else, but her speech got me thinking about my own college experience in the 1970s, in Plattsburgh, NY.
In some respects, my undergraduate years aligned with hers. The first piece of advice she offered was, “Party!”—and boy did I ever. This was especially true of my freshman year, and I’m not just talking about weekends. At our favorite bar—a wonderful place called The Monopole—Monday was dollar-pitcher night, and on Tuesdays the special was 50-cent shots of tequila. The celebrations went on from there, and since the bars were open till 4 a.m., my friends and I saw many a sunrise before crawling into bed.
I wasn’t out every night of the week, of course, but there was always plenty of partying in the dorms as well. Since the drinking age was only 18, we had no problem staying stocked up on Molson Ale. And while marijuana was still very much illegal, it was as plentiful as beer.
In spite of this, I almost always went to class. I did so in part out of a sense of responsibility that my parents had ingrained in me. I felt I owed it to them to do well. And since the internet had not yet been invented, there was no way to even know about assignments without showing up.
Admittedly, I didn’t always want to be there. My required science classes were especially dull, and I barely passed them, even with perfect attendance.
Even some of my English classes—required for my major—tested my staying power. This was partly due to the material (Beowulf, for example, never failed to put me to sleep), and partly because of a couple of professors who had all the charisma of Ben Stein’s character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Fortunately, I had other teachers who more than made up for this. Chief among them was Dr. David Mowry, my philosophy professor, who lit up my mind in every session. Had I skipped classes and still managed to skate by I would have missed out on one of the best intellectual experiences of my life. I also have fond memories of a journalism class with a man named Herman Doh, an unabashed conservative who often irked me and, in the process, taught me how to formulate sound arguments. Then there was a Dr. Miller, who illuminated for me the writings of Emerson, my guiding intellectual and spiritual light to this day.
I could name others, but you get the idea. It was in the college classroom that I discovered the joys of being in the company of people who valued the life of the mind.
All that said, the richness of my college experience was vastly enhanced by activities outside the classroom: in my four years there, I served as editor of the student newspaper, deejay on the radio station, lead actor in a play, performer in a modern-dance company, and member of the gymnastics team. I was never very good at the sport but that wasn’t the point. The experience of trying was invaluable.
That to me is what the college experience is all about: Trying things out in an effort to discover both your own potential and the astonishing varieties of the human experience in all of its beauty, ugliness, banality, humor and possibility of transcendence.
Even my partying was a learning experience, since late-night, beer-soaked conversations in the bars and dorms often plumbed philosophical depths while also teaching me about the nuances of social interactions and the challenges of regulating desires, emotional pain, elations and conflicts both external and internal. There was also the acquisition of some very practical knowledge, such as the realization that it’s unwise to take a five-second guzzle from a bottle of vodka while the Doors’ Morrison Hotel is blasting through the speakers at a party. (I woke up at 1:30 the next afternoon without a clue as to how I’d ended up back in my room.)
The college experience was, in short, the traversing of a bridge from adolescence to adulthood, during which I learned about everything from my life’s calling to the dangers of overindulgence. And it was all rooted in curiosity stimulated by the sense of both social and intellectual freedom that campus life afforded me.
I’ve come to think of it in terms of concentric circles, where the classroom is central but the outer circles of social life and extracurriculars are just as important, in the same way that the earth’s core is no more important than its upper layers.
That my student doesn’t yet understand the value of that core can perhaps be forgiven. She is, after all, very young.
And yet, I do worry about this new generation, which was force fed online engagement from toddlerhood and has thus had its innate curiosity stunted. Online algorithms after all feed us more of the same rather than challenging us to become explorers of uncharted territories of our minds.
A case in point: The other day in that same class, in an effort to help them come up with topics for their next speech, I asked them to name some of their interests.
I got nothing but blank stares.
“Really? Nobody has any interests? Music? Sports? Nothing?”
Cemetery silence.
It was unclear whether they are really that dead inside or whether they spend so much time in cyberspace that they’ve utterly lost the ability to engage in real group conversation. In fairness, I will say that my other classes are a bit better. But even there, many of them have to be reminded if not ordered to remove their headphones, which they apparently wear every waking hour. It’s as if they’re trying to shut out the world rather than fling the emptiness out of their arms into the spaces we breathe, to paraphrase Rilke.
I suspect that the enduring trauma of the Plague Year is at least partly to blame. But whatever the reasons, the darkness of these encounters saddens me deeply. I haven’t given up hope. There must be a way to fight this deadening of the American mind. Still, all too often these days, I feel like Sisyphus, determined to keep pushing on in the face of futility.