By Maya Sulkin
Sunday, August
28, 2022
Dear incoming college freshman,
It’s time to make some Important Choices.
By now, your new “.edu” inbox is overflowing with emails from administrators
asking you about your preferred dining options—Are you vegan? Do you want
your meals to-go? Are you sure you’re not a vegan?—and
roommates—How do you feel about night owls? How clean do you expect your new
BFF to be? Is it okay if this person smokes?—and all the clubs you might
join: Badminton, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Glee, Ski Racing, ChicanX Caucus, Anime
Society . . . you name it, they’ve got it.
Then, there’s your dorm. You’ve probably
spent hours, as I did, on Amazon and Dormify, shopping for the perfect dorm
room essentials until even when you close your eyes, you’re seeing
floral-printed duvets. Once you’re on campus, you’ll have to choose your spot
in the library, your seat in the lecture hall, your on-campus gym.
But before you devote untold hours to
mapping out exactly how you think the next four years of your life will go, I
want to offer you this thought from a college senior who learned it the hard
way: None of these decisions really matter.
They’re not important because they’re not
real. They might feel like actual choices—I know they did to me when I started
school. But I have come to understand them as fake ones—ones that distract us
all from the fact that college has become a place where students no longer make
real intellectual and moral choices, the choices that actually matter.
Beneath the surface of all those meaningless
choices, whose purpose is to assert meaningless differences, is an overpowering
sameness. We may have different diets and duvets, but we quickly absorb the
fact that we are all supposed to think the same. That sameness is kept in place
by an array of social forces, cues, nods, and emojis. Sometimes
it’s overt. Sometimes it’s just a vibe.
I suspect it’s already familiar to many of
you. It’s the lack of discussion in lecture halls because people think they
think the same things or because they’re afraid to use the wrong word, or get
called out. It’s the rallies where people have no idea what they’re calling for
and don’t care because they just want their presence to be noted, tagged, and
liked. It’s the students and professors and T.A.’s nodding along, clapping
uproariously, at all the correct platitudes that nobody bothers to
unpack: Defund the police! Free Palestine! Believe all women! (All
of them? Really?)
And sometimes, unbelievably, it’s a
prominent, tenured professor with decades of experience and accrued wisdom
quietly, behind closed doors, acknowledging that your unpopular opinion—the one
you were bold or dumb enough to give voice to in class—was actually valid, that
she didn’t want to say as much in front of her students, because, you know,
it’s easier to go along. (True story.)
Baruch Spinoza—some of you will encounter
him in Intro to Modern Philosophy—tells us that the only true freedom is
freedom of thought. It comes from what you believe, not what you say you
believe or what you look like. If Spinoza were to reappear on campus today,
he’d see a lot of people with different colored hair and tattoos and piercings
who insist they are living their truth but are, in fact, unwitting prisoners of
someone else’s.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the father of
contemporary existentialism, wouldn’t be surprised in the least. Sartre tells
us that, okay, you may be in possession of your freedom, as Spinoza says, but
you don’t want it. None of us do. We might say we do, but we’re lying to
ourselves. To Sartre, we avoid freedom and lean into imprisonment because
freedom is hard.
They’re both right. And the best way to
break free of this double bind (resisting false freedom and then forcing
ourselves to seize the real one) is to make choices that amount to statements
of moral preference. They are a part of a bigger assertion: I will be free.
Often, these choices are subtle. For
example, my friends. I have four of them. I’m not a weirdo. I’ve just only met
four people on campus who insist on being free—the people who have shown me,
more than anyone else, what it means to stand up for something, to make an
argument, to listen, to admit being wrong, the people whom I admire and respect
and really, truly know. It is because of these four friendships
that I am now inching toward graduation, knowing that I’ve transcended the
isolation I faced when I arrived three years ago. Back then, I found myself in
situations much like my professor in the seminar course I described above:
afraid, clinging to sameness for the sake of comfort, and surrounding myself
with like-minded people.
I was lucky enough to find these four
friends because I chose to take classes that taught me how to think, how to
distinguish between fake and real choices, how to find meaning in other
people—and ultimately, discover myself. It was in one of these classes—Medieval
Intellectual Life—that I met my best friend. In a discussion on Thomas Aquinas’
definition of human nature, my now-best friend was the only person who
disagreed with me—vehemently. (I argued that Aquinas believed that, as we
learn, we discover ourselves and, by extension, God. He countered that learning
has nothing to do with self-discovery.) At the time, I found him annoying and
assumed he hadn’t so much as glanced at the reading assignment. As we left
class, he asked me to get coffee. My natural instinct to shut him out was
replaced with a sense of endearment and, eventually, into respect and deep
friendship. I attribute our friendship to our mutual desire to escape
sameness.
Another important choice I made was to go
to class.
In the fall of my junior year, I took a
class with Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president and a prominent legal scholar,
called Freedom of Speech and the Press. At the time, graduate students were
striking for higher wages and health benefits. Eventually, my peers stopped
attending class to signify solidarity with their T.A.’s.
One day, the strikers barged into our
lecture hall, screaming in the president’s face and encouraging students to
leave the class. Many did. I did not. In the days to come, in a group chat with
my friends from that class, we established they would not be attending the next
class. “Are u guys going,” someone texted. That was followed by: “No,” “No
lol,” “no,” “Like the most inappropriate class to attend today,” and then,
“It’ll just be u and Lee and his bodyguard,” and, finally,
“Lmaooo.”
I kept going. Not just because I was given
the opportunity to take a freedom of speech course with one of the most
important free speech scholars in the world, or because each lecture runs
roughly $700, or because I am truly interested in the subject, though all of
those reasons are part of it. I chose to go because other people storming into
class and telling me what I was supposed to believe and do felt wrong. Like it
wasn’t me. Like I was being asked to conform to the blob, to give in to the
sameness.
I didn’t want to be part of the reason
that in America, in the 21st century, a teacher needs a bodyguard to teach
class. And I didn’t want to be a part of the reason that students feel ashamed
to go to class either.
So, as I sat in the lecture hall chair,
biting my nails and tapping my foot anxiously against the floor, I debated my
next course of action. If I stayed seated, I would surely be excluded from the
study guides that my friends would pass around in group chats.
I pondered getting up with everyone else
and walking out of the lecture hall. If I did walk out, I told myself, I
wouldn’t chant along with everyone else or clap or add to the madness. I’d
simply leave class, keep my head down, and be rewarded with study guides and
maybe even a friend to add to my four-person collection. And I’d try to pretend
I wasn’t ashamed of myself.
And then I thought: No way.
I stayed. And sure enough, it all happened
exactly as I expected. The angry stares. The judgment. The exclusion. And you
know what? It was worth it. I may not have made myself any friends that day,
but choosing to act according to my conscience—choosing to stand apart without
falling apart—is the most important, real choice I’ve made on campus.
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