The Bowdoin Orient

April 6, 2001
Volume CXXXII, Number 20

Extensive Letter

To the Editors and the Bowdoin Community:

I'm not the type of person to waste my time writing this, because I know what happens. Those of you in the student body who know me are already thinking, "Oh, Dan, he's just being funny." And those of you in the faculty who know me are probably saying, "Well, Dan's an intelligent enough student, but I've seen this type of thing before, especially from seniors." But both groups need to take this seriously. This is serious. For every pissed-off student like myself who actually bothers to articulate his/her thoughts, there are probably fifty, if not five-hundred, who don't.
I'm going to make a few observations that point to a fundamental flaw in how Bowdoin and its students go about their business, and I want to offer a solution. Unfortunately, all of what I am going to say rests on the silly, pre-existent condition that we are here, a condition that arises from a whole tidal wave of assumptions, acquired in grades pre-K through 12, about what Americans are supposed to do with their lives. It's a condition that I have no power to reverse. However, what I am going to say might be a start, at least for us.

-Chapter 1. Student Life

Let me tell you what I see. I see 99% of us walking around with our heads up our asses-we're delirious. We see the same faces all the time, the same places; we hardly need alcohol on the weekends because we're so shit-faced on the brain-numbing repetitiveness of school life as it is. This is a place where we come between breaks, deprive ourselves of sleep, food, and sex, and bury ourselves in work that most of us don't even care about. I see an enormous, inexplicable disconnect between the intensity with which we work and the amount we actually care about that work.
I'll come back to the disconnect in Chapter 2, but first I want to present the specific circumstances that led me to that conclusion. In each of these circumstances, I implicate myself for participation, so I don't want any letters or emails from athletes and do-gooders telling me how wrong I am-I used to be an athlete and a do-gooder.

A) The huge number of extra-curricular clubs, ranging in purpose from music to republicanism to meditation, touted as a productive use of your personal collegiate time and possibly something for your resumé. But at base all of this clubbing and volunteering is an attempt at flight from the Puritan/capitalistic impulses upon which this college, and much of our society, is spawned. In the context of Bowdoin where the work ethic-lamentable or not, stated or not-is behind each of our 'personal' motivations, clubs represent an avoidance of what modernity's version of fate has stuck us here to do. Clue A is an avoidance of our course work.

B) The rapidity with which students leave class for their sports practices and athletic activities. At around 4 o'clock each afternoon, I see people flooding from their dorms towards the fields and fitness centers. In its extreme form, I see the underpinnings of anorexia (WARRIORS is one club I wouldn't do away with). In its lesser forms I see, simply, a lot of neurotic behavior and wasted time.

C) Periodic gripes about the intellectual community at Bowdoin (i.e. "There's no discussion outside of class"), or about the community in general (i.e. "There's no diversity in the student body"). These two gripes are tricky; they are often presented as the disease itself, rather than as symptoms of the disease. I myself have said both of those quoted statements, and I have written them publicly along with a lot of others. Yet there is discussion outside of class, and there is diversity-the problem runs deeper than all that.

-Chapter 2. The Intractable Flaw

   Take note: most of us came in here with some immoderately vague idea of what we really wanted to do, which conspired with some immoderately clear idea that our parents would hate us if we didn't go to college or, heaven forbid, took a year off.
   Once you matriculate, the school begins to wear you down. They have you sign up, almost randomly at first, for four classes a semester, and each professor loads a syllabus on you not only as if this were your one course, but as if they were the one professor around who truly loves all this learning (don't you?). Between "Class participation," "Attendance," papers and exams, students are spread so thin that, semester in and semester out, the main thing we are learning is how to juggle responsibilities and appear prepared.
   But I want to avoid saying that it is just the workload; the flaw is more complicated than that. It has to do with the way in which 'work' conflicts for each of us with a rounded, social existence.
   We have become habitual in procrastinating not only our assignments, but also the living of our lives. The only things we live for around here are weekends, breaks, and the famous "year-off-after-I-graduate." Seldom do we find real interests and never do we find a passion that could survive, in a former student's words, "its first trip to the dining hall." I remember as a first-year feeling disturbed with that situation, as a sophomore feeling increasingly broken, and as a junior getting the hell out of here. Now as a senior I feel only tired of it all. Like other experienced students, I spend my days artfully navigating around all but the unavoidable scholastic and social encounters.
   This system needs to change; the constant sense of forcedness behind the social and academic environment undermines the school's mission. (Or perhaps the mission itself [page 1 of your catalogue] is, like the typical syllabus, running in too many directions.) I would like someone in the administration or faculty to write back and tell me just why American higher education is what it is. Why we finally make it out of high school, into a purportedly good (and not overly cutthroat) college, and still find ourselves run into the ground. And don't try to tell me that this type of training builds character for 'real life.' Bowdoin builds character as do dysfunctional and abusive households-that is, by engendering in its brood either farcical attachment or desperate resignation.
   The flaw has two results. First, students externalize work, turning 120 thousand dollars into nothing more than shared complaints over extended dinners. Second, we internalize our desires, turning what should be shared (goals, dreams, love) into dirty little secrets that we stew over in our dorm rooms.
   I call the flaw intractable because it runs so deep-it runs all the way back to the way we were raised, at least for those of us who were raised in America.

-Chapter 3. The Solution

   I have some theories about this, but most of them are too infused with my own personal strategies for maintaining sanity around here. The only thing I can say that I think will strike a chord with most everyone is:
   Tend to yourselves. This means don't sign up for one more semester unless you have some sense of what you're doing. Don't buy into Bowdoin's mythological greatness. Don't buy into the admissions propaganda and the big building names and the bullshit prophecies about how many artists, writers, and powerful men this place turns out. For every one great person Bowdoin produces, there is a whole graduating class full of persons for whom Bowdoin was merely the coup de grace in a life of past and future degradation.
   This place is only as great as you are yourself.

Dan Farnbach '01