My frustrations with the college experience
In our time, we are urged to attend university for the so-called “college experience.” A concept so nebulous, abstract and utterly drenched in middle-class euphemisms that it lulls budding students into accepting the ridiculous notion that it is perfectly reasonable to drop a sum equivalent to that of a new car every year on an “experience.”
Allow me to bring us back down to planet Earth: this is not normal. all me old-fashioned, but aren’t universities supposed to be dedicated to the creation of new knowledge and the uncovering and eventual dissemination of truth? When did these institutions become annual, nine-month-long camps for parents to send their overgrown children?
Speaking strictly for myself, I have no clear conception of what this “college experience” is supposed to be. Yet, judging from the pages of this paper and word-of-mouth around campus, one can quite quickly discern that whatever the experience is supposed to be, students on this campus don’t believe they’re receiving it. And they’re mad about it. I think that we undergraduates tend to complain far more than is often called for, but in this instance, I think our collective frustration is warranted. But in the name of the nuance that is so often lost when we air our grievances about this place, I wish to channel this frustration into a genuine discussion about expectations and business models.
As indicated above, it is no secret that students at Brandeis are not satisfied with their experience on campus. I think the root of this dissatisfaction can be understood to emanate from a weariness students feel toward “Brandeis” (The Public Relations Version). I think students are waking up to the reality that the Brandeis they enrolled in is not the “Brandeis” that the University is becoming. “Brandeis,” the smallish liberal arts university with an in-the-works engineering program, bustling student life and state-school-like sporting events is decidedly not the Brandeis students thought they were getting.
Why are we fatigued by this version of “Brandeis?” Because it is inauthentic, and everyone who knows the school for its legacy can recognize this. My own experience and the ones of fellow students in my circle have led me to recognize that most professionals who are familiar with Brandeis off-campus have a certain concept of it in their minds: that of a small, rigorous liberal arts school with a slightly radical bend. It’s collectively recognized for being an unpretentious yet top-notch institution due to its collection of faculty who could easily teach at the Ivy League level and students who were probably rejected by it. This is the legacy Brandeis has benefited from for most of its existence.
This has been the model for much of Brandeis’ existence: hire great faculty and make them stay, take on the students Columbia University rejected and by the grace of God try to stay on top of the finances. That third tenet — as we’ve been made aware — wasn’t always realized with as much success as the first two, but somehow the university overlords managed to keep the lights on, the faculty and staff paid, all while providing students with a sound education. And enough downtime to protest for an African and African American Studies department. What more could you ask for, really?
Somewhere in the long, uninterrupted reign of neoliberal hegemony, Brandeis restructured. Due to a series of fiscal pressures, it added a business school (much to the chagrin of many) and began thinking of itself as a seller of an experience and its students (and their parents) as customers. And it was not the only campus that did so. Most universities, especially smaller ones without endowments as large as Harvard University’s or Northwestern University’s — except for a privileged few, such as St. John’s University in Annapolis and Santa Fe University — had to restructure their business models (lest you forget that a university is a business first and a provider of higher education second) to suit a quickly changing marketplace.
We can point the finger at Reagan, the Bushes or Clinton for advancing the deceitful idea that higher education should essentially serve as a credential dressed up in booze-bender-smelling “experience,” but the damage is already done, and pointing fingers is not a trade I think particularly highly of. So, let’s just go back to the particularly abysmal job Brandeis is doing at trying to be “Brandeis.” Judging by how (sometimes justifiably) displeased students seem to be with this institution, I think it’s worth taking seriously how inauthenticity is perceived by students. And to take the financial considerations of running an operation the size and scope of a university seriously, let’s call students (and their parents, who, let’s face it, are the ones likely paying for this overpriced year-long camp) consumers.
Consumers don’t like perceivable inauthenticity. We especially see this in celebrity culture; the instant a celebrity is perceived to be acting inauthentically, the moment they appear “fake,” they are ridiculed by the public. Even if their authenticity produces a social good, celebrities with the misfortune of being called “fake” are thrown out like spoiled milk. We even see this in fiction. Recall the insult Holden Caulfield reaches for as soon as he doesn’t like someone: “phony.” “Phony” appears 48 times in J.D. Salinger’s classic, The Catcher in the Rye, often dropped by Caulfield to suggest the shallow inauthenticity of another character in the novel.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to understand some of the students’ dissatisfaction with “Brandeis” (The PR Version) as fatigue toward the University’s desperate attempt to market itself as something that it’s not (and was never intended to be). This is not a massive state school (Baruch Ha’Shem); let’s stop pretending that it is, with absurd events staffed by people who’d look like they’d rather eat crushed glass than serve another scoop of mediocre ice cream into an ungrateful student’s bowl. I genuinely don’t believe that people come here for a state-school experience, and if they do, I suggest they go elsewhere.
Admittedly, it is neither sexy nor ultra-profitable to market a university as a safe haven for dorky Ivy rejects who don’t want to settle for their safety schools, but to be frank, that’s exactly what Brandeis has historically been. And it’s enjoyed a kickass legacy from this kind of image. I mean, c’mon, Marcuse taught here and James Baldwin literally visited campus! How sick is that? Bob Dylan played a great show here literally weeks before he blew up and changed the music scene with the release of The Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan and David Hackett Fischer wrote many of his best books here. That’s exactly the Brandeis many of us thought we were signing up for but is increasingly that Brandeis that is being lost.
I’m not a financier, nor do I pretend to know the first thing about running an institution the size and scope of a university. But if I have learned anything from brief stints in political economy, it is that you cannot hope to grow and shrink simultaneously. We can either choose to immediately cut costs and focus on making what already exists here as outstanding as possible, or we can sink ourselves further into a deficit with the hope that those investments will return on their cost later down the line. We cannot do both. And you can look at the conundrum centrist parties in Europe find themselves in right now to support my judgment.
I think everyone involved in academia in any way — meaning students, their parents, faculty and administrations — has to get comfortable with the idea that experience is something that has to be formed organically. No matter how many bureaucrats you hire to staff the Department of Student Affairs, experience is not genuine (and therefore meaningful) unless it is forged organically. It can’t be created in a controlled environment of corny events with SWAG that will be thrown out or donated by the semester’s end. Experience will be created by interactions between students, staff and faculty organically. We don’t need these expensive and, frankly, phony bells and whistles to have a meaningful, enjoyable and overall positive attitude towards this institution.
Many of my peers and I sought out a modest, small liberal arts university that offers a top-notch education without the hellish environment of an Ivy League campus when we began our college applications. We do not need ludicrous events (whatever happened to teach-ins and picnics?), phony SWAG, or God forbid, another D-list performer that no one’s ever heard of to headline Springfest to make our “college experience.”
Meaningful experiences need not be grossly financed. Most of my most treasured life experiences have been on family hikes in my hometown, runs along run-down highways, conversations shared with my favorite faculty in the simple comfort of their offices and home-cooked dinners shared with my closest of friends. These experiences aren’t extravagant. What makes them significant is the feeling they filled me with. College needs to be thought of in the same way. We should not expect a business, a university, to provide us with an experience. It should provide us with a framework for experience, for its infrastructure. But the actual making of experience is something only persons can create among each other.
Brandeis has been and can continue to be a place where genuine, meaningful experiences are forged, and it does not need to be anything other than itself to do so. Despite my ignorance of the University’s finances, I appreciate the gravity of the situation. It is not easy running a successful young, small liberal arts university in these times. And I say all of this because I want this place to be successful; I have a lot of love for Brandeis University, and I want it to thrive for many years to come. It is precisely for this reason that I hold these views. In a superficially shallow world, young people want the real. We want the actual, the authentic — this place is special, and that uniqueness is exactly why people have been and continue to be drawn to it. We ought not to abandon what makes this place special in the hope that doing so will keep the lights on.
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