Researchers have explored the impact of news coverage of the civil rights movement and its influence on public and social opinion. A researcher from Princeton University’s political science department, Omar Wasow, suggested that the media covered civil rights protests in the 1960s in different ways, depending on whether protests were peaceful or violent. He argued that when protestors remained peaceful, particularly in the face of aggression and violence, the resulting images shocked a complacent nation into action. But when the protestors themselves turned violent, even in self-defense, the media message shifted from a framing around civil rights to one around the need for control. 

Immediately following the catastrophes of the Second World War, a slew of academic articles, papers and reports were published on the “mass.” Intellectuals from American sociologist C. Wright Mills, to the political theorist Hannah Arendt and the gang of German exiles hanging around philosopher Max Horkheimer, wrote on the problem of the “mass,” or mass society. What does the “mass’ refer to, you may ask? The “mass” describes a group of people who have no sense for their individuality or what relates them to each other.  

In other words, a mass is a collectivity of strangers who are lonely amongst a crowd. These strangers are made twice estranged — both from themselves and from their peers. They hold no conception of self, meaning they can’t provide an answer to questions seeking to fill a conception of self with positive content. Furthermore, they can’t say what about themselves and their peers connects them to each other. They’re atomized, and are therefore made blind to the commonalities that they share with their peers.  

Why am I introducing this seemingly-arcane concept forged largely by highbrow, German intellectuals in tweed suits who despised the American “take-it-easy-baby” ethos? Because it maps onto the culture at this University. 

What is “Brandeis culture?” I argue that it is the set of norms and practices which have led to the collapse of the distinction between the “who” and the “what” for students at this University. If you ask someone on this campus who they are, they will give you a response which details what they do. They will not have answered your question. The collapsing of this distinction is precisely why nearly everyone on this campus is depressed, overextended, unsatisfied or overmedicated. 

Before we go any further, I can anticipate one of you good Marxists objecting with something like, “Aha! Yes, what you say is true and is indicative of the fact that the capitalistic ethos has crept into every institution in our social, political and economic lives.” I’m willing to entertain this objection and even accept most of its claims, but I’m unwilling to accept that this culture is somehow preordained by the proletariat’s lack of ownership over the means of production. 

Contrary to popular Brandeisian opinions, there are different ways of student-ing. We are just unwilling to accept them for reasons that I have trouble even calling reasons — because that would imply something resembling a justification supporting these purported explanations which is nowhere in sight. Capitalism can be blamed in part for this culture, but you all — undergraduates — may not be responsible but are in fact culpable for upholding this culture.

Students here have an ideal in their heads of the “successful Brandeis student,” and we think that this student takes on three majors and three minors, leads multiple organizations on campus and takes five classes every term. Everyone has this image in their minds, and they think that if they are not realizing this ideal, then they are not “doing enough.” Somehow, we’re undeserving of success or praise if we’re not always embodying this ideal. Allow me to call this what it is: absurd.

It is not “praiseworthy” to be overextended to the point that you’re not a reliable friend. You will not be “successful” in your professional life if you’re dissatisfied with your personal one. 

The problem with this ideal is that in the race to realize it, we all become homogenized. Despite surface-level differences, we’re all fundamentally the same kind of person here. It is almost as if a degradation of personality has taken place on this campus: everyone is the same person at their core. And yet, students often admit to feeling lonely… it’s paradoxical, were it not for the fact that I’m explaining exactly what our dear German intellectuals understood as constituting a mass. None of us understand what it is that relates us to each other beyond being “Brandeis students,” which is not (or ought not to be) an identity, but an empirical fact. 

I had the privilege of studying abroad at a very different university last term, and I can assure you that students there did not think of themselves as students. That concept was reserved to describe what they did; it was not used to depict who they were. Hence, I ultimately reject the Marxist explanation for what is going on on this campus because this does not have to be the way we go about college. Marxist theory requires a kind of scientific, historical necessity that the culture on this campus does not. We are all contributing to a culture that demands students to wipe away every semblance of individuality, and for what exactly? Another line on your résumé? Another internship in which you do next to nothing and watch the clock tick every second of precious time away? 

In the introduction to her magnum opus, German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt asks her readers to “think what we are doing.” I ask the same of you. Think about what it is you’re doing and why. Who exactly is telling you to take that internship which doesn’t compensate you for your time? Who is urging you to take on an unnecessary course that you don’t actually enjoy? Who told you that you need to be on another executive board? And who gave them the authority to tell you those things? Are those things adding to your life, and I mean in a much different way than by merely filling a gap in your Google Calendar, that reflects much more than the hours in a day? 

The culture here is insufferable, and I hope we start awakening from the dogmatic slumber it has placed us in. I don’t intend to come off as patronizing in these remarks. I reject any comparison to the philosopher in Plato’s allegory of the cave who emerged from its deceptive shadows to find truth in the world. I haven’t found truth, but I have found some perspective (or so I’d like to think). I can assure you, being miserable without the time to do anything other than study, sleep, eat and black out to escape further studying is not a way to live. It is a way to exist, but we should expect to do much more than that — especially now. 

College is a unique time in our lives. You will never have this much independence with so little responsibility again — I promise. Why trade this opportunity to really live as you are in exchange for the burden of leading too many organizations, taking courses you don’t enjoy or doing internships in which you learn so little? We don’t have to do this. We don’t have to exist in this way. Disintegrating into a mass is not an inevitable consequence of coming to Brandeis; it is a choice we make and lifestyle we uphold. I ask us to demand more for and from ourselves.