The Bowdoin Orient

April 13, 2001
Volume CXXXII, Number 21

Farnbach writes again: addendum to a previous letter

To the Bowdoin Community:

What I am saying is neither revolutionary nor obvious; I am trying to voice an open secret. I tried last week to explain the nagging bitterness that many of us, though we sense it, are stubborn enough to ignore and leave unexplained. That was the easy part, for you and for me. This week I'm trying to explain that process of ignorance, the process by which we ignore all the shit that goes on, and the process by which this very letter will be placed under the heading "shit that goes on," and thereby ignored. I am trying to end the blindness, but I think it can only be done through extreme cynicism. I hope you keep reading; I promise it's not pretty.

Message to students

We operate under the bubble protectorate, but it's not the bubble that's dangerous. What's dangerous is the way in which we uphold that bubble every day, even when we think we're breaking it down. What's dangerous is the particularization of "college life," the way in which it is set aside from the rest of life, like an idyll.
   Joining community groups won't help. That's always playing the same game. Just stop and think about it for a minute.
   We treat "college" as if it were some isolated incident of our lives, painful yet useful. We are consciously sacrificing a certain portion of our lives towards future success; that much is clear. But what I want to point out is that, alongside those conscious sacrifices (school-work, volunteering, sports), we are, without even a thought, cutting off the means we might still and already possess to achieve success, if that's our goal. By participating in college we are trying to avoid a life of mediocrity, and yet the way in which we participate in college does not prepare us for anything else.
   Example: I have a hunch that I could be a successful painter, and I have the desire, but I can't major in art because I need a serious major, and besides, I want to preserve my art in its natural state, something beyond the confines of what I can learn at Bowdoin. I will major in Economics and take up painting again when I'm forty-three. I'll probably have to swallow my pride and take an art course at that point, down at the local community college, but just to refresh my skills. Then I'll be painting.
   The problem with this line of thinking is that it is blind. It ignores the question that if we are giving up on our desires now, what will we be doing when we don't have the bubble? What kind of a sacrifices will we be making then? What does it mean to "get the most out of Bowdoin," if what we are doing most of all is perfecting our powers of self-denial and self-censorship?
   Bowdoin is an elite institution. It is a place that is supposed to be set apart from the capitalistic machine, a place where we are supposed to find ourselves and come into our own. But the way we try to accomplish that is by waving goodbye to our folks and spending four years pretending we don't have any origins. Look at the way we act at parties, and the nonsense we say in classes-the folks back home wouldn't know whether to laugh, cry, or turn away. And the worst part about it is not that we're cutting ties with our parents-it's that we're acting exactly the same way that they did in college. The worst part about it all is that in our very attempts to find our 'true' selves, we only find ourselves looking into a funhouse mirror that goes back and back into the generations of narcissistic college-goers that preceded us.
   American college is not different from American society; college, like America, is consumerist and petty and, at least once a week, vomit-inducing. But I'm not out to overthrow culture. I'm out to get people talking about this stuff, and I entertain only a remote fantasy of rebellion-one directed towards Bowdoin College and its pompous bureaucracy. I would love nothing more, on a personal level, than to see so many firstyears and sophomores quit this school-for at least a year and whatever the price-that the College can't even go on functioning. Hey-why not?

Message to professors

   The process by which we students all ignore everything I just said runs parallel to the process by which teachers will ignore everything I am about to say. Nonetheless it has to be said, because the two processes are equally dangerous.
   I would like to draw a parallel between the student body's particularization of "college life," vis-a-vis the rest of life, and the faculty's particularization of "class life," vis-a-vis the rest of campus life. I find it very interesting-and I think so will other students-to observe that the specific way most teachers operate in classes has an effect on the specific way most students operate in social settings, in the rest of campus life.
   Heather Hughes, an independent legal scholar, has a few things to say about education in America. Hughes notes that most discussion that goes on in class is "an exchange of pre-fabricated ideologies," which she likens to students beating on drums in a rather predictable and boring rhythm. I'm sure this sounds familiar. Hughes goes on to say that students are never pushed to explore new types of rhythms, nor do they ever explore even the circumference of their own drums.
   But what Hughes implies, and what I want to say here, is that no matter how challenging the teacher, no matter how foreign the course material, there is always a mountain of work left to be done in educating students to think. Just as students scramble to break down the bubble protectorate, but are always caught in a cycle of upholding it, teachers scramble to make students think creatively and "outside of the box," but are always caught in a cycle of upholding their own stake in that box. The professor who simply runs students through the academic paces, even if he or she does it in a "creative" way, is not doing his or her job.
   We all know it's a damn struggle, but you need to think hard, and incessantly, about where your efforts are going. Most often, they are going down the drain.
   So with that in mind-what is the effect, alluded to above, that class life has on campus life? The short answer is that the person you see so diligently banging her drum in your class is the same person so diligently poisoning herself on weekends and preparing herself for nothing beyond her class schedule, her community involvements, and her sports competitions-endeavors of "college life" that in the end are sometimes helpful for the student but always helpful for Bowdoin's reputation and hence, your job. Yet your job is to provide us with an education, a way to relate to the world as people. You can't separate the student and the person, and you can't dismiss the fact that you are our providers in the market. Many of us want more for our money than a few notes about your personal academic fancy.
   Simply put, we're graduating unfulfilled, we don't feel more skilled than when we came in, and if anyone wants to say otherwise just look at the behavior of recent Bowdoin graduates. They know nothing better than their relationship to the bubble, and to someone else's work (yours). They seek some kind of replacement now that it's gone. Don't flatter yourself in thinking that all those people going to grad school are impassioned about law or medicine or history; many of them are simply lost.
   Teach speaking. Teach writing. You haven't done it yet.

Message to all

Students are paying a ton of money and four years of time to come here. Do not ignore this fact, because it is supposed to be an exchange, and there are too many of us who leave here without ever getting what we paid for. We don't get an education-we graduate without much desire to think and even less desire to express our thought in voice or in letter.

Dan Farnbach '01