I went to a small liberal arts college (Reed), which, you know, I’m not saying that’s perfect or anything, but one way in which I feel fortunate is that it was profoundly uncynical about the value of learning. We absolutely absorbed that.
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It's the same at Swarthmore. My students don't have the careerism I've seen at other schools, nor, as such, a "the ends justify the means" attitude to anything. Sometimes I worry they aren't cold blooded enough! But I'll take this.
That said, Alexis, we were both Harvard '04 and managed to have careers in fields that are supposedly impossible and impractical, so even those schools provide a measure of this spirit.
It’s also interesting because 25 years ago, I thought of Swarthmore as the more careerist cousin of Haverford, but am realizing I have held this unsubstantiated bias for a quarter century without really thinking about it
I'm very curious about this! Haverford has a long relationship with Cantor Fitzgerald, so that has influenced my thinking about it. But I'd like to know how outcomes break down for these two and Bryn Mawr. I always hear that Swarthmore produces a lot of PhDs.
Hah! True. I tried to go into finance. It just didn’t stick… and I was pulled inexorably to working in a terrible (and collapsing!) industry doing stuff I really love doing.
Definitely a subset of young people I meet are the same species moth, you know?
Yes, for sure, and sometimes they end up in finance 😀. But I'm glad you followed the reverse path. I do wonder how much tech/startups as a first-choice stop (where i-banking and consulting once stood) have drawn away some of the more humanistic students who would tried something else otherwise.
I think that’s a good question… it certainly might seem worth the gamble for a few years. In finance, the path to middle age was so so clear and obviously miserable. You could tell yourself a different story about tech (until you are a middle manager at Meta at 40 with $$$ life expenses)
I went to Hamilton and had a similar experience. I did grad school at the University of Chicago, where every single student undergrad and grad, was a total nerd/geek (maybe not the b-school, but everyone else).
Then I did more grad work at Princeton, where most of the undergraduate students...
...did not so much want to GO to Princeton as to HAVE GONE to Princeton. They were all, of course, incredibly smart, but for them the amazing education they had available to them was just the starting point on their way to being Masters of the Universe.
If anyone I know cheated, they sure didn’t say anything to me, not because there was fear of being caught, but because the assumption, from the moment you walked in, was that learning was something worth doing with your whole heart. IDK.
Later, it was a bit of a shock to me to learn that the academy suffers the same market pressures and careerism of any field, but I don’t wish I’d learned that sooner. Grateful for that window.
I went to the Residential College at UMich, which was a small liberal arts program inside the larger uni. The year above me was the first to have grades (admins in the larger U forced the RC to give them out). There was a huge cultural divide between the RC and the rest of the U; it was wild to see
One year they tried to shutdown our dorm's library; I think it got occupied by students and then a committee of students took over running it. It was a really magic place with art studios and a dark room in the basement. Wouldn't trade it for anything
In a funny way, I'm glad I went to graduate school just before the market collapse - not that I'm glad I never received a job, far from it, but I had the kind of window you describe, in which I could pursue scholarship without, say, feeling I needed to cultivate pretend interests for the market.
This is the enduring legacy of my medieval studies masters. It really ingrained in me that if I want to do or know a thing I have to REALLY KNOW the whys and wherefores
Same (Swarthmore). I'm curious if that's still the case at my alma mater, though - the social forces rendering college vocational are larger than these schools. And my dad, also a Swarthmore alum, thinks the place had become less academically rigorous by the time I was there.
Had a great convo with my kid (also at a SLAC) about the use of ChatGPT. Her take was, "I don't judge people who use it, but I, personally, don't want to hand my thought process over to a robot. How am I going to learn from that?" I love that she embraces the struggle as part of the goal of college.
I went to FSU but managed to have a very similar experience. I carefully picked my classes by checking out the professors office door and looking for early hours though. I wasn't unaware people where box checking but I had evasive maneuvers.
Same (Reed), carried it through grad school, and still feel the same. Most of the students I teach now get it, and I can often bring the more cynical (or preprofessional) around to get there, too… makes for more fun all around.
I have a pal who's on the faculty there and has been feeling wretched about things recently. I'm going to screenshot your post and share it with them. You'll brighten their day.
Same. I mean… I went to small, justice-focused Christian school but still… liberal arts! That part really stuck with me
(Also being a first gen student absolutely meant spending years learning to internally justify liberal arts against the need to be “useful” but… whatever)
Sewanee grad. here - I was thinking the same thing this morning. We joked from time to time about how our degrees were useless in the 'real world' but the value of learning and curiosity was self-evident.
I managed to make it through almost 4 years at an Ivy naively thinking a majority of my classmates were there because we all just really loved learning for its own sake. But I’m grateful for that naïveté... Even my parents were like “but what if you made some money?” and I didn’t get it 🫠
I went to a big state school (Florida state) in the 90s, and for me all it took was a few professors in a single department to create a sense that I was part of a community devoted to a shared enterprise of learning. It was the high point of all my years in academia, easily.
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I left a major because of cynicism (anth) but went to sociology because of how caring folks were. They saved my life at my lowest.
Will always pay that forward.
Definitely a subset of young people I meet are the same species moth, you know?
Then I did more grad work at Princeton, where most of the undergraduate students...
Seems a pretty chill school
(Also being a first gen student absolutely meant spending years learning to internally justify liberal arts against the need to be “useful” but… whatever)