After 125 years or so of being the most collectively Joe College nation on Earth, many Americans have turned sour on the idea that a higher education — or at least the four years we have traditionally set aside for young adults to get a bachelor’s degree — is key to an informed, successful life.
Not me.
But the varsity blues are otherwise rampant.
Perhaps our culture had gone a little bit too all-in on the tradition, and this is just a course correction. I have noted before in this space that in my observations of car rear windshields in dozens of countries around the world, we are the only one that is positively bonkers in identifying the schools in which we, or our children, have matriculated, through decals and bumper stickers.
The Citroens of Paris and the Jaguars of London are not adorned with signifiers bragging “Sorbonne” or “Oxford.” I don’t quite know if it’s simple humility or a lack of school spirit, but the fact is their license-plate holders do not announce, as does mine, “Go Bears!,” or the equivalent, to the driver behind them at the stop light.
I do realize I was lucky in having been accepted into the University of California system during its golden age of taxpayer support. I got to study at the greatest public university in the world for a tuition that never varied from its annual $637.50 price tag from September 1973 through June 1977. That, the $200 monthly check my (sainted) mother sent me and the $15 a week I made for writing for the student newspaper covered everything: rent, books, meals, beer, whatnot.
Undergraduate bliss. Or, if not always entirely that — there were inevitable heartbreaks, and the vague existential dread of adult life around the corner, in which you’d somehow have to make ends meet — four formative transitional years in between living under your parents’ roof and having to fend entirely on your own. If I was lucky, at least I knew that I was, and never took it for granted. I wasn’t smart enough to be a slacker. I never missed a single class, freshman through senior years.
Of course, the information imparted wasn’t always at the hands of the professors. On a university campus, you have your beliefs challenged, or at least you ought to. For instance, as a perhaps naive believer in the essentially correct nature of American foreign policy, the Vietnam debacle aside, I had never for a minute as a high school student been exposed to any notion that Israel was anything but entirely righteous and correct in its dealings with its Arab neighbors. But walking through Sproul Plaza one day, with its ubiquitous “tablers” espousing various political causes, from Young Communists through Young Republicans, I stopped to read some pamphleteering giving the Palestinian side. You mean land was taken from families with an ancient claim to it without proper compensation? The world was more complicated than one had been led to believe.
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And now, as is only fitting, it’s time to play the role of old grouch. Students arrive on campus these days more set in their views, less open to conversion. You hang with the like-minded and issue trigger warnings to those who would challenge you. The Palestine-Israel situation is a sadly perfect example of that. And so, as someone who still spends a lot of time on college campuses, I was glad to read recently of efforts by college administrators to get young people to open up. In a story headlined “To Dial Down Campus Tensions, Colleges Teach the Art of Conversation,” New York Times reporter Anemona Hartocollis writes: “On a warm November day, a group of Columbia University professors set up ‘listening tables’ near the center of campus and hailed students rushing to class, inviting them to stop and talk.”
They smartly bring pizza as an enticement, so some things never change. But it’s often the dire wolf of Gaza that still howls loudest at the tables. A woman in a kaffiyeh in one conversation talked about “this genocide.”
“I wouldn’t call it a genocide,” said Scott Barry Kaufman, a psych prof moderating the group.
“Do you hate me because I disagree with you?”
“No, she did not hate him — ‘for that reason,’ she said,” Hartocollis reports.
“Ouch,” Dr. Kaufman replied.
Hey, at least they’re talking.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.