Shameless Self-Promotion 17 February 2011
Posted by Emily in Blog, Princeton.add a comment
In response to an op-ed in the Daily Princetonian on Monday, which argued that Princeton should institute a core economics requirement, I have written a jeremiad:
Princeton does not require that its undergraduates take courses in any particular department, and so Berger’s call for an economics requirement reads as an assumption that the discipline is more valuable to the world than others. But it is problematic to prioritize economics as a lens through which to view the world. As critics of political economy have been arguing since Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations,” viewing historical and individual development primarily in terms of the creation, accumulation and transfer of wealth is dehumanizing. It erases from our understanding of the world all the things which differentiate us from computers: our abilities to love, to empathize, to feel happiness and sadness, to make decisions for ourselves and for our families and communities, to organize our actions around a desire to be better people — and “to form a more perfect Union.”
It is for this reason that Princeton’s ideal of a liberal arts education “in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations” does not privilege economics above any other discipline. Students are given a grounding in many analytical methods but not in any one set of assumptions about the values which should guide national and international development. The philosophy of a liberal arts education holds that young people can better serve their nation and all nations if they have four years during which they can develop their critical faculties and their moral compasses and decide for themselves what it means to live a good life. It holds that we are at university to develop our minds and our souls, not our “Monopoly” properties.
Please read the rest. Then read my friend and colleague Luke Massa’s thought-provoking piece, also in today’s Prince, which articulates a theory of positive liberty with respect to our coursework. And then think about where you stand on the question of education for education’s sake.
“better”; or, A Brief (Rather Cryptic) Meditation on Human Flourishing 27 September 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Personal Life, Princeton.add a comment
It was a long, full weekend between first and second weeks. As I make a to-do list just now, at the end of Sunday night, and reflect on all the pages I haven’t yet read for this week’s classes, I think about all the things I have done in the past three days: all the hours I’ve spent talking that I might have spent reading; all the hours I spent reading that I wish I could have spent talking, had my academic demands not presented themselves so pointedly; and the strange little pieces of insight and accomplishment I snatched out of an ordinary weekend of anxiety and mounting lists as I find myself confronted by the enormity of a semester’s worth of work still to come. But this weekend I had some rewarding conversations, to be sure; and I discovered that I seem to have some sort of bizarrely unexpected talent for improvisational vegan baking (I’ve certainly never been good at anything to do with kitchens before); and I helped someone in what seemed to me to be a very small way, just with a short list of technology-related questions to which I happened to know the answers, but which in answering I came to realize stood for far greater points to be made about human nature, about human flourishing, and about how to stay strong amidst deadlines and the endless pressure that is aspiring to academic perfection.
I was there to be of technical use because I was doing my usual routine in the dining hall, eating my unhealthy food and drinking my shitty coffee and talking to everyone, and thus I was in the reach of someone who needed someone to accost in order to have his need for small technical answers gratified. And it was a joy to me to spend some Saturday afternoon in so gratifying, because for the service I rendered him he repaid me in the most heartwarming and caring grateful conversation I am sure I have ever encountered from someone to whom I’m not closely blood-related. In more hours than the ones I spent on this small task, it is this someone more than any other who has instilled in me a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose. It would certainly be indiscreet to elaborate further, but perhaps the title of this post will give at least some readers a clue. Suffice to say that the task I was able to complete reminded me what I have learned in the past two years about doing one’s best, being one’s best, and using both these strivings to overcome the crippling insecurity of a neurotic life on the margins of the Ivy League. Suffice to say that when I feel as if I belong at Princeton, I know whom I ought to begin by thanking.
I lay out the story of my Saturday in the vaguest of terms so that I can go on to suggest that my Saturday is entwined inextricably with Princeton itself, and with the idea of Princeton, beyond the connections which the actors in this story, its setting, or indeed any psychological drama so superficial as my “legacy complex” would suggest. I cannot help but think that no other of the places I might have gone to university would have given me a dining hall where such an encounter of social democracy could occur; I cannot help but think that the culture of no other university would permit questions of “bettering” to be the takeaway from an afternoon playing at tech support, no matter the predispositions of my anecdote’s characters to considering such questions (and reader, those predispositions: they are many).
I have been thinking recently—particularly as I completed a survey about opportunities for women’s leadership at Princeton—about this university’s struggle to remake itself. Today Princeton is an institution profoundly concerned with the desire to right its past wrongs: to bring those it previously cast to the margins into the middle, to open its ranks to all who are entitled to enter, to make all its students feel as if they are welcome and valued. I know from my experiences and those of my friends that our ivory-towered four-year home is not always so very successful at fulfilling its promise of a clean break with a reprehensibly old-boys’-club past, but to look around the university today is to see those who would not have been allowed through its gates in the past; to walk through campus today is to feel as if one no longer has to fight quite so fiercely to belong; to be involved (even as an observer) in campus politics is to become closely acquainted with and invested in the desire to be better, to transcend past sins and poor judgment calls. I feel as if it is only here—in a place preoccupied with its own history, self-regarding and self-referential enough to make the call to progressive improvement into a kind of whig-history call to prayer—that Saturday afternoon tech support could become so clearly a call to arms in the war of careful self-improvement.
For reasons not entirely related to the train of thought running through my mind while I wrestled with network settings that Saturday, I came home once all was resolved and looked up the Greek word εὐδαιμονία. Transliterated “eudaimonia,” it’s a concept central to most of the ancient philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics. It could be translated as “happiness,” or, in a formulation I really happen to enjoy, “human flourishing.” The thing is that most of the canonical ancient philosophers disagreed as to what, precisely, εὐδαιμονία entailed; most of them disagreed as to how virtuous your life need be to be εὐδαιμον. But most, it seems to me (of course, I could be entirely wrong; all I did was read a few articles online), agreed on one thing: εὐδαιμονία was an end, a moral end, an aspirational end. Nirvana, but less absolute and more subjective and as secular as you want it to be. It’s a promise, and a call. And, for me, it’s what is at the end of a life of learning and teaching: a life of the deep interpersonal relationships only pedagogy can form, wherein perhaps attaining εὐδαιμονία rests upon listening to the words of your teachers as best as you can to make yourself better, and then taking careful notes and preparing your own lectures and doing as well by your students as your teachers have done for you.
I said to someone last night—in a conversation which began with my mentioning, briefly, my role as tech support in the course of my day—that I may eat with my friends, spread out across the campus, but I couldn’t imagine, for as long as my time at Princeton lasts, living anywhere else but the college that is my home. The weight of this declaration is only just sinking in 24 hours later, as two things occur to me. The first is that this must be because I cannot think of leaving this college until I have given back to it and its students all the spirit-sustaining goodness that it has given me. The second is that if Princeton’s administration should ever need proof that it is succeeding in its efforts to right its previous iterations’ wrongs, it need look no further than my testimony. I could fail my thesis two Junes hence; I could barely pass my way to commencement and kiss an academic career goodbye, and yet my undergraduate education would still have taught me the most important thing of all: that we all, universities and their teachers and students alike, must seek to be better, to be εὐδαιμον, and to our own selves to be true.
The Trauma of Theory: A Cautionary Tale 30 August 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Cultural Criticism, Personal Life, Princeton.1 comment so far
I had my first run-in with literary theory in the spring of my freshman year. I was halfway through my first college English class and thought I knew everything; I figured that because I’d read Paradise Lost and was increasingly able to follow along when I heard graduate students talk about their work, I’d be able to listen to a faculty member I knew give a paper on a panel concerning a topic in which I was interested, and know when to smile and nod. I let some people talk me into attending this panel, and I knocked off my work-study job to stand in the back of an overflowing auditorium, full of optimism and full of myself.
And boy, was I sure mistaken. Not only did I not understand the poem the speaker was discussing when she passed around photocopies of it; I didn’t understand a single word she said about it. I don’t remember, today, what the title of the talk was, or what argument she might have said she was intending to make; I only remember blank incomprehension, and confusion, and shame. I remember becoming increasingly worried and upset as I failed to grasp anything, failed to understand why what the speaker was saying was important to an understanding of the poem, failed to nod or chuckle with the rest of the audience. I ducked out before the end of the panel, too ashamed of my lack of understanding to drink the coffee, pick over the fruit tray, and say hi to the people in the audience whom I knew. I went home and cried. Though surely no one in the audience even noticed me, much less knew how confused I was, I felt as if I’d been exposed as a pretentious fool, and I realized how ridiculous I’d been to think that half a semester of intro lit could have prepared me for the rigors of professional literary criticism, or indeed the realities of the professional academic world. A few English classes and theory talks later, I have learned enough to watch the people in the audience whom I think are clever and nod when they nod; I have learned to stay for the fruit tray and let myself be introduced to people no doubt wondering what this awkward undergrad was doing at their talk; every so often I can grab hold of a sentence out of the paper which relates to something I’ve read or learned from a class, something which reminds me that the speaker isn’t talking in a foreign language after all. And I have come to accept that, as an undergrad, as not even an English major, as someone of merely average intellect who hasn’t read the theorists the academics make use of in their talks, there is no reason why I should understand the strange language they speak, their inscrutable methods of making sense out of a text which to the uninitiated sound quite all Greek (or perhaps all French, given the context, except that I actually do understand French, and what they say doesn’t sound like any of the French I know). Even if I can cope, now, with this incomprehension—enough to keep masochistically putting myself through the routine, in the hopes that someday I will understand—that afternoon at that first panel remains one of the most frightening and embarrassing moments of the first half of my undergraduate career. For someone such as me whose sense of self-worth is rooted nearly entirely in the degree to which she’s taken seriously by professional academics, there is nothing quite so awful as it being so matter-of-factly demonstrated to you what an outsider you are.
I was reminded of this episode today not only because, with twelve days to go until I’m back on campus, I can think of nothing other than the academic world; but because I read Adam Kirsch’s brief obit of Frank Kermode in Slate. Kermode is one of the people whose name has entered my sphere of awareness through the academic conversations on which I habitually eavesdrop; like so many such names, I’ve never actually read his work, a fact which, like it does with so many other such names, never fails to produce a distinct feeling of shame. The point, however, is that I can’t comment on Kermode’s views of the state of literary criticism today except through Kirsch’s interpretation of them, which will no doubt expose me as a charlatan far more obviously than my failure to understand theory talks does; however, what Kirsch says does have some bearing on that very problem of failure to understand theory talks. According to Kirsch, Kermode expressed considerable concern about the inaccessibility and hyperspecialization of literary theory, and the modern habit of scholars of literature of keeping the public (like me) unable to understand what it is they do—due, I suppose, to their reliance on a particularly inscrutable and difficult set of secondary literature. Kirsch pays tribute to Kermode’s status as a consummate generalist and a popular critic in the London Review of Books (which he helped to found) and other publications, labeling this manner of practicing lit crit a dying breed in favorable contrast to the theorists.
And, well, it’s difficult not to sympathize with this perspective. As cognizant as I am that my failure to understand theory is probably due either to my own stupidity or my lack of initiative at studying on my own the fundamental theory texts which would help my understanding of that world, I must to some extent think that the sense of alienation I feel isn’t entirely my fault. I’ve taken a number of English classes for someone who isn’t a major, have dabbled in theory, have done my best to understand what it is my friends and my colleagues in my sister department do. And I have come to believe in the relevance of theory to understanding our world: when it’s explained in a simplistic way for undergrads to understand, I’ve gotten excited by it; I’ve seen firsthand the transformative power of, for example, queer theory on a queer person’s understanding of hirself and the world, and that’s a good thing. But I do find myself agreeing with Kirsch (and perhaps Kermode, though as I said, I don’t have a good sense of how much Kirsch is quoting Kermode, and how much he’s offering his own take) that what the academic practice of literary criticism and theory so insulates itself from the world of people who don’t have advanced degrees in the subject, we have a serious cultural problem which matters a great deal.
But why does it matter so much? After all, one Ivy-League-brat-with-self-esteem-issues’ self-absorbed feelings of alienation are probably not that important in the scheme of things. Recasting the language of literary criticism such that someone who hasn’t read a single post-structuralist could still engage with the process of thinking about literature won’t help to eliminate world poverty and hunger or stop global warming or bring relief to the flood victims in Pakistan. But a citizenry which sees the practice of humanistic inquiry as part of its time could restore reason and civility to the political sphere. It could find in itself a desire to reinvest in education and the arts in the name of the next generation. It could, regardless of whether there is such a thing as narrative or such a thing as reality or such a thing as authorial intent, become interested in scrutinizing the claims of politicians and pundits who take even more fast-and-furious approaches to Truth than do literary critics. Because, see, the fact is that we need the humanities. The practice of the close study of texts makes us better citizens, better thinkers, perhaps even better people. But if that study is not just hidden in an ivory tower, but hidden behind a wall of words, it’s going to be very difficult indeed to make the case for its survival to a public which cannot understand what it is that humanists do.
Of course, it would be lovely if we lived in a world in which people said, “I do not have the knowledge or cultural capital to understand your work or the culture in which it exists, and yet I will take your word for its importance.” But, as we all know by reading daily news which attests to the systematic defunding and vocationalizing of higher education, this is not the world in which we live. We live in a world in which intellectual culture must be rigorously defended as a good in itself, and in which a discourse which can bridge the gap between the closed circle of the academic conference panel and the larger western culture of anti-intellectualism is yet to be outlined. In order to do this, it seems to me as if it is necessary to rethink academic culture into something which is not dedicated to separating insiders from outsiders, and to rethink literary studies in particular into something which does not reward mere inscrutability and punish and induce shame in those who are not members of the club. This is not to say that theory has no place in the practice of understanding the world and its texts (or films, or music, or art, or culture), but rather simply to point out how difficult it will be to make a case for the humanities going forward, if the Frank Kermodes of this world really are such a dying breed. We have our work cut out for us—and I especially. Not only do I feel as if I need to begin to consider what it means to belong to the next generation of humanists still in the process of learning what it means to be engaged in this project of understanding the world through its texts; I need also, I feel, to do the reading and listening necessary such that I can loiter unseen in the back of an auditorium, listen to a scholar speak, and not feel quite so hopelessly, shamefully left out of a culture in which I want so desperately to be taken seriously and to belong. Once I feel I have moved beyond the stage of twenty-year-old charlatan, perhaps I can start to articulate a humanism I can call my own—but is it too much to ask that the theorists should meet me halfway?
A Word From Your Friendly Neighborhood Peer Academic Advisor 23 August 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Nerdiness, Princeton.add a comment
As I spend more time reading the professorial blogosphere, I find myself more frequently tempted to comment on academic questions I, as a college junior, am far underqualified to have an opinion about. I may be awfully opinionated, but you should probably listen to the professionals if you actually want to learn anything useful about life in the academy. That said, though, I was just barely, bureaucratically ineligible from becoming a peer academic adviser for freshmen in my college this year, and I have plenty of thoughts about what I did right and wrong in my first two years of university that may be worth sharing with my now-nonexistent advisees.
In the spirit of Historiann’s recent post about undergrad satisfaction and regrets, Tenured Radical’s advice to faculty academic advisors (no, I still don’t know whether “advisors” or “advisers” is correct, so I’m using both), and the multiple letters I’ve already gotten this summer from frosh and sophomores who want some advice on choosing classes; and in order to offer a more constructive tone than that of my whiny distribution requirements post of a couple weeks ago, I offer here some thoughts directed at first- and second-year university students trying to navigate a new academic world. These thoughts are probably better-suited to academically serious students for whom college is more about learning and intellectual development than it is about anything else (not to say that’s what college has to be; some students feel that way and some don’t), but I don’t see why it shouldn’t apply to anyone concerned about making the right choices and learning to decipher academia.
Listen to the experts. As Tenured Radical indicated in her post, the online rumor-mill is of limited use in determining which classes to take, especially if you’re looking for good classes and not just easy or fun ones. But many’s the time I’ve ignored the advice of a professor or grad student who knew me, knew the person teaching the class, and knew that I wouldn’t find the professor or the material a good fit for me. Work on politely phrasing questions such that you can ask a professor not what she thinks of her colleague’s teaching, but whether her colleague’s class would be a good fit for you. And if she says it wouldn’t, pay good attention to that recommendation.
Keep an eye out for professors’ names. Often I’ll ask frosh who’s teaching a particular class, and they’ll say they’ve forgotten the professor’s name. But a class taught by a fantastic professor, even if its topic is outside your immediate area of interest, is a better use of your time than a class in your area of interest taught by an unremarkable professor, and so it’s advisable to remember those names. This is where listening to the experts comes in, as some sources on who the best professors are will be more reliable than others. If you’re torn between the professor and the subject matter, take the professor every time. And be aware that a lot of different people teach, e.g., Victorian literature, or the American history survey, or SOC 101, and you might want to wait to take the class until the best professor is teaching it.
Be careful about what you can handle. Starker than the social divide between undergrads and “sketchy” grad students is the divide between the humanities and the sciences. If you’re a humanities major like me, you probably grew up thinking that as a “humanities person,” you couldn’t possibly be any good at math or science. You may have picked your first semester’s courses thinking that since your SAT math score was on the low side, you couldn’t possibly handle a college-level quantitative class, and so you decided to sign up for the easiest quantitative class in the whole university, a computer science class whose syllabus explained quite clearly that it was going to repeat a lot of material you’d already learned in high-school computer science. (This may or may not have happened to me.) That syllabus, dear frosh, is a good indication that you’re not going to learn anything from the class, and that you should consider taking one which will teach some new concepts.
This is not to say, however, that you need to choose the most challenging thing in all areas outside the ones in which you’re confident. To fulfill my lab science requirement, I took physical anthropology and environmental science: not taxing in the same way university-level physics or chemistry is, but nevertheless useful, interesting, and well-taught, and therefore not a waste of time. If, when you’re honest with yourself, it seems that it would take more work to pass intro physics than it would to get an A in your required departmental seminar, it’s probably best to leave yourself the time to get the A in your required departmental seminar.
Plan ahead. It’s probably just a tad neurotic to make a plan for what you’re going to take every semester for the next four years (which is not to say that I haven’t done it…), but you’ll find that it will benefit you to think farther ahead than the next semester. By the time you’re halfway through college, the number of course slots you have left will start to look increasingly finite (especially if, like me, you’re planning on a semester abroad), and you’ll find yourself having to make difficult choices between queer theory and colonial American history, or suddenly realizing that the course you’ve wanted to take since you sent in your matriculation forms is only offered in one of your four years. It might be worth looking through the course catalog, making a list of all the classes you feel as if you can’t possibly graduate without taking, and keeping an eye out for those titles every semester.
Start a new language. Obviously if you’re an engineer or premed or have three majors this is more tricky, but college is really the best time in your life to start a language you missed when you were young, and I regret only continuing the ones I began in junior high and high school. You may want to think about which new language will help you most in your future areas of academic or professional interest, but studying a language for which you can’t see any possible “use” is still worth it, and is “useful” for its own sake; I really regret chickening out of starting ancient Greek. Which brings me to my next point:
College doesn’t have to be vocational school. College students seem increasingly to be thinking of their bachelor’s degrees as discipline-specific professional credentials which will prepare them for specific career paths, or which just sound vocational (first-years of the world, academic economics is not the same thing as business or accounting!). There’s nothing inherently wrong in this, but you should know that there’s no reason to feel pressured to study something “useful” or something which has the same name as a profession. Not only can you certainly have any kind of successful professional life with an undergrad degree in any field, but studying what you love is important in and of itself. You should figure out which classes you enjoy the most and find most intellectually stimulating, and then continue to take those classes. You’ve got enough time to develop a career—right now, it’s time to learn how to think, and how to love to think.
This goes doubly for grad-school-bound kids. Just because you’re majoring in a not-usually-vocational subject doesn’t mean you can’t make it vocational by locking yourself into a path focused solely on grad school admissions and on making preparations to succeed in the professional world of academia. Your professors can advise you on what you need to do now to be prepared for grad school (and indeed whether you should apply at all), but it doesn’t hurt to distinguish undergrad from the rest of your life. Your undergraduate thesis is not a dissertation, your A- in a departmental seminar will not sabotage your chances of getting into a top program, and trying out courses across the curriculum won’t prevent you from being good at your intended field of study. You’ve got 5-10 years in grad school to become a specialist and to lose sleep over the job market; undergrad is not the right time.
Try out possible majors early. If your system is like the one at my school and you have to declare a major the spring of your sophomore year, you’ll probably want to take introductory/survey lectures in a variety of different departments your first few semesters. In terms of figuring out what you want to learn about for the next few years and possibly longer, doing this kind of exploration is more important than knocking out core-curriculum requirements just for the sake of knocking out requirements. While I regret some choices I made in my requirement-juggling, pushing the philosophy and science requirements till junior and senior years in order to try out sociology and English was not one of them. By taking sociology early on, I avoided making a terrible mistake when I discovered that I actually don’t like data; by taking English early on, I found a second home which has enriched my study of history in countless ways. And, indeed, don’t just stick to intro classes: by making time in my freshman-year schedule for an upper-division history course, I came in through a back door which got me much more enthusiastic about the discipline than subsequent more intro-level courses have.
However, there’s no need to take this selection process too seriously: your undergrad major does not determine the rest of your life. As per the comments about vocational education above, your undergrad major will probably have very little impact on what you do as an adult, even if you’re grad-school-bound. I know so many academics who have changed fields, it’s not funny—so study what you want to study right now, and let the rest follow.
Be skeptical about all-freshman programs. Your university is probably selling you a line about the “first-year experience,” and about how rewarding taking a freshman seminar would be, but I’ll be frank: a class entirely populated by first-years isn’t going to challenge you very much. This is not to say that just because you’re an academically serious student you’ll be better at college than everyone else in the class, but taking a lot of all-freshmen classes, while less scary than being in classes with mostly older students, can limit your opportunities to seek out mentors among the older undergrads and grad students who, in my experience, will make the difference in your undergraduate education.
The bright side of special small classes for first-years, particularly if you’re in a field or at a university which doesn’t otherwise offer a lot of small seminars, is that they can get you in contact with faculty early on, which is much harder to achieve in intro lectures with hundreds of students. I became a research assistant for the professor of the freshman seminar I took my first spring. Helping him do archival research and organize his primary sources that summer not only convinced me I wanted to be a historian and, practically speaking, taught me a lot more about research skills than I’d gotten in my classes so far; it also gave me a lasting mentor on the faculty. Such opportunities are not to be sneezed at, and can be worth 12-15 weeks of not learning a whole lot from your classmates.
Only compare yourself to yourself. In my first year I wasted hours sobbing to myself about whether my comments in class discussion were as clever as my prep school-educated classmates’, or whether I deserved to be at Princeton even though I couldn’t reference as many post-structuralists in casual conversation as some of my more pretentious classmates could. But I’ve learned not to worry: when professors evaluate your work, they’re not doing so on the basis of how frequently you can name-drop Lacan. As a first- or second-year, you cannot expect yourself to be as well-versed in disciplinary methodology or jargon as older students who have been in your department for a couple years and have done a lot more work in the discipline. Just make sure that you’re consistently putting in the most effort and turning in the best work that you can sanely manage, ignore the students who are obviously just bullshitting, and allow the ones who really know what they’re talking about to teach you how to talk the talk of a budding historian, or whatever it is you should happen to be.
Have fun, but carefully. For the academically serious student, a creative non-fiction writing workshop is a good “fun” class, and a worthwhile addition to your schedule. A 450-person children’s literature lecture largely populated by jocky fraternity and sorority members who spend the entire lecture talking about their upcoming rager may be more frustrating than “fun.” (I’ve done both.) It’s not wise to take only the most challenging classes, especially if you’re taking more than the required number of courses/credits; you’ll burn out. An arts class in which you turn in a painting or a performance can be a much-needed change from a barrage of 8-10-page analytic essays. But “easy” and “fun” are very different things. You’ll regret “easy” halfway through the semester when you’re in discussion section, no one’s done enough of the reading to have a conversation, everyone’s checking Facebook on their phones, and the poor instructor has long since given up holding the entire class’s attention. You’ll find yourself wanting to check Facebook, too, and let me tell you: it’s all downhill from there. If you’re uncertain about whether a class will be “easy” or “fun,” ask for advice.
And the moral of the story is…
Talk to adults. When you start college, you’re still a kid. You think the way you were taught to think in high school; you’re unused to making decisions (whether academic or otherwise) for yourself; unless you’re an academic brat, you’re probably unfamiliar with the arcanities of academic culture. Obviously, this is not your fault; it’s just the way things are, and at times academia can be a bit too impenetrable for its own good. But your next four years will be a lot more pleasant if you can crack the system, and it’s faculty and staff members, graduate students, and older undergrads who can help you make this transition both to adulthood and to an academic community. If you’re an academically serious student, regardless of whether you want to spend your life in academia, I can guarantee you that your life will be changed and your worldview will be opened if you allow your path to cross with those of older friend-mentors. Visit office hours. Accept dinner, lunch, and coffee invitations. (In my first year, I declined a coffee invitation from a grad student. I was shy and hadn’t yet figured out the social rules of meeting people for coffee, and that he was being friendly, not creepy. He could have been my friend, and I regret it to this day.) If you go to the sort of school where grown-ups eat in your dining hall and grad students and faculty members live in your residential system, sit down at their tables or knock on their doors. (If you don’t go to this kind of university, it’s certainly more difficult to meet grown-ups, but I’m given to understand it’s not impossible.) Ask them about your courses, but also talk to them about the books you’re reading, the things you’ve seen in the news, the brave new world you’re just beginning to puzzle through. Ask them about their work: you might discover a new area of interest. It’s not every four years that you’ll get the chance to live in a community populated by people in all different stages of life and intellectual development, and this is the most valuable thing you can get out of college. It certainly has made all the difference to my undergraduate education.
In fact, I think Tenured Radical’s academic-advising post made this point most effectively:
Needless to say, I made some spectacular errors in that first two years and had some great successes, all of which had to do with the opportunities and pitfalls of a large university. Would things have been different with a more attentive advisor? I doubt it. It wasn’t until, entirely by accident, I fell in with a group of graduate students and became invested in being regarded as — not a good student, but scholarly — that things straightened out for me.
This is actually the story of my life, so I feel qualified to endorse the strategy of seeking out mentors and not worrying too much about whether you’ve correctly distinguished one core requirement from another. Focus on having the time of your intellectual life and allowing your world to be opened and changed, and the rest will follow.
And dear readers, if you have any of your own advice for the Class of 2014, do leave it in the comments!
Madison Mornings; or, Homes and Homecomings 6 June 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Personal Life, Princeton.6 comments
a work in progress
When I feel the dampness of summer on the east coast—eighty or ninety percent humidity, mosquitoes during the day and fireflies at dusk, clothes sticking to my body and a slow laziness to the air that prevents me from reading more than a page before dozing off—I have a curious flashback to Madison, Wisconsin. I spent two weeks in Madison five years ago, my first experience of east-coast summer in several years. We rode our bikes around the lake; we had barbecues in the front yard; we lit citronella candles as the sun set late. I remember Madison as quintessentially summery, like the summers of children’s books from another era—the only difference being my first-generation iPod mini and its Scottish folk music. I was fifteen and hadn’t yet discovered rock, and the fiddles and pipes and accordions and guitars took me on long walks in the stickiness of midday or on long drives through pitch darkness from Shakespeare festivals or dinner parties back to our sublet. Now, when I’m in New Jersey and the temperature first climbs above 80, or the first dinnertime thunderstorm rumbles in the distance, I find myself back in that state-capital college-town green-tree lake-shore summer.
I was in Madison because I am an academic brat. My father was teaching a summer seminar at University of Wisconsin-Madison and so we all followed, as we do. We sublet the house of a professor on leave in some foreign country; we hung around the campus but also played tourist in this university town different from our own. We had dinner parties and party parties with our ad hoc academic enclave, where my sister and I talked Shakespeare and Democratic party politics and played video games with the other professors’ nerdy kids, or chattered at kind and well-meaning faculty spouses about our summer camps and our favorite subjects in school, while the professors talked shop and the grad students drank beer out of bottles and gossiped about who might have a job where. My memories of Madison are at times as hazy as the hot and sticky air by the lake (I know we were only there for a few weeks, but in my recollection those weeks stretch out into an entire pastoral novel), but what I remember principally about Madison was the humidity and the feeling of belonging to an academic enclave. In San Diego, where professors and their families live all over the city, and there are three major universities and several minor ones, we have no academic ghetto. The seminar my father was running, on the other hand, condensed time and space: a set of far-flung colleagues from across the country into one college town and a circuit of department parties into one summer term. It was one of the strongest experiences of community belonging I can recall—and perhaps, then, it is no surprise that the slightest touch of dampness in the air, the lowest rumble of thunder in the distance, sends me back.
—–
Last Tuesday was one of these Madison days, when the fan was on all night and I woke up at 7am to a morning already sticky and still. My alarm was set to three hours earlier than normal because 1,166 seniors and 804 graduate students were receiving degrees from Princeton that morning, and I was being paid $10.90 an hour to stand outside in the 90-degree heat in a shirt and slacks and an academic gown in order to take tickets and direct traffic and tell parents that, no, they could not enter the seating area two hours early; and, no, they could not sit in the reserved section without a ticket; and, no, they could not stand in the way of the academic procession and impede the progress of the president, the board of trustees, and the honorary degree recipients. For three hours, my gown caught on the mechanisms of folding chairs and I took orange tickets from antsy parents while my mind wandered off to bikes and lakes and citronella candles and Scottish accordions.
But it was not just the weather which made Tuesday a Madison morning; it was also all the trappings of academe. The cumbersome black gown signified that I belonged to the same community as the seniors in black; the graduate students in black with orange stripes; and the faculty, trustees, and honorary degree recipients in their rainbow of regalia. There is something unifying and meritocratizing, I find, about academic regalia: it suggests that we are all engaged in the same project of celebrating not just the degree recipients, but also the very existence of the institution of higher education. Watching the graduates process, I felt certain that I would someday have a hood to wear with my gown, and even someday have three velvet stripes on my sleeves. In hearing the formal rhetoric (some of it in Latin) which conferred degrees upon my friends and colleagues, I felt invested in and excited by the mission of my university and of the university in general. When, at commencement’s conclusion, I and my fellow ushers lined the path of the recessional, I felt a great sense of membership in a common mission to educate, to produce knowledge, and to credential the next generation to do the same. Wherever we stand in the hierarchy, whether we have hoods and caps and stripes on our sleeves or not, we are all a part of this mission—not dissimilarly from how it was in Madison, when I talked Shakespeare with the other professors’ kids in imitation of our parents talking shop.
—–
Three days of alumni reunions precede the three days of commencement exercises at Princeton, and I expect that this former celebration is where the majority of the tens of thousands of people who descended upon Princeton’s campus that weekend found their community. I witnessed their exuberant rediscovery of old friendships, their rampant alcohol consumption, their orange-and-black school spirit, and their participation in the parade of alumni classes which for four hours winds its annual way down the road which cuts through the center of campus. It was difficult not to take part in bits of the three-day bacchanal, and I chanted my school-spirit cheers along with the rest of the crowd, perhaps finally singing our alma mater enough times to remember about half of the words.
And yet while reunions proved an enjoyable three days of dancing with good friends, they also left me profoundly unsettled. The event is no celebration of the University (qua cultural institution), as I have known it for the past twenty years and four months. Rather, it is a celebration of Princeton: of old white men and cheap watery college beer, of entitlement and privilege. The nausea I felt when one class of alumni somewhere in the 1970s carried signs lauding the percentage of their class making six-figure salaries and the percentage of their class whose children had also attended Princeton was not entirely assuaged by the jubilation I felt when the crowds cheered for the first classes to graduate women. I woke up on each of three mornings to the disgusting and dispiriting sight of my quad—my home for the past nine months, the center of my residential college and thus my emotional life—covered in garbage, stinking of vomit and stale beer, and I was furious with the alumni whose 45th reunion had snatched my quad away from me, from my university, and from my sense of university. I felt displaced and ill-at-ease, driven from what I’d come to think of as my home.
I was able to recoup some sense of belonging when I went to the LGBT alumni’s Saturday-night party, a lame little student-center-basement event made much less lame by dance music I knew the words to, welcoming friends, and a sense of being among “my people.” Knowing nearly everyone in the room, and dancing with nearly everyone I knew, shifted the dynamic of reunions from something which displaced me to something which welcomed me, and I felt once more that—Milwaukee’s Best-drinking old white men striving towards the Platonic ideal of entitlement notwithstanding—there is a place for me in 21st-century Princeton. It was a sloppy little party at the end of the bacchanal, populated by a ragtag collection of queer kids who’d had too much to drink. But when we all wandered off in the early hours of the morning, it was at least after having been in a multipurpose room where everyone knows your name, and where orange, black, and massive and omnipresent class-consciousness were less important than Lady Gaga to having a good time.
Since, however, it was only the queer party’s dissimilarity to the rest of reunions which saved it from being condemned with the rest of the debauchery, it would take more than a few Madonna songs for me to restore my faith in Princeton as ivory-towered home. This would instead entail three days of listening to speeches and pointing people to the nearest restroom; of entertaining myself by guessing professors’ grad schools by the color of their gowns; and of feeling not-so-secretly thrilled every time I got a smile from a be-regalia’d professor processing past me. By the time Tuesday morning came around, I felt more solidarity with anyone wearing a black gown than I did with anyone shouting “Tiger tiger tiger sis sis sis boom boom bah!” I was proud that I have apparently, after all these years, retained enough Latin to make sense of the salutatorian’s address; I helped to instigate a standing ovation for Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she received an honorary degree; and I applauded wildly President Tilghman’s address, in which she admirably called upon our generation of Princeton graduates to return maturity and civility to the public discourse. Eventually, chatting at my residential college’s reception with the faculty, graduate students, and staff who comprise my surrogate family, Madison morning slid into Madison afternoon—and I was back at the end-of-the-summer-seminar barbecue, telling the academics who all my life have been my literal and metaphorical family about my plans for the summer and then going back for seconds of pineapple and watermelon.
—–
I write this now in Rhode Island, having put my books in boxes and left campus for a while. Maybe I’ll spend some time at my parents’ university when I’m home this summer, but for the next little while I’m among dear friends who don’t play the academic game. It’s summer vacation, and I for one am glad, after a hectic and stressful (but productive) year.
And yet it was on summer vacation that my family went to Madison five years ago, and it was on summer vacation that, last night, I wrestled my network settings into letting me log into the Princeton network remotely so that I could search archive databases for a particular manuscript relevant to the enormous research project on which I am just beginning to embark, the one which I hope will someday become my senior thesis. The leads I found on the internet suggested that this manuscript was given to some library or another—maybe the Library of Congress, maybe the New York Public Library—but no one seems to know which library exactly. As I trawled through the most likely catalogs, marveling at my ability to use my own university’s library resources even though I’m gone till September, I was reminded of the crucial difference between college and academe. College is a four-year adventure, a transient state of packing one’s life up every few months and moving to a new dorm, a new internship in a new city, a new academic project. Semester by semester, your life changes: you grow older and wiser; your research projects get longer; your friends graduate; new friends matriculate. Life is constant change in college, as I found two weeks ago when I realized—to what should not have been my surprise—that packing up my life and vacating my old and beautiful sunlit room over the archway was normal.
But if college is impermanent, academe—in my life, anyway—is the state in which things will always be. Perhaps I am only reminded of this on Madison mornings which turn into afternoons in the Scribner Room, evenings in Rhode Island researching my thesis, or sleepless nights spent stressing about the job market. But academe was my life from the day I was born—and at some sudden moment maybe a year ago, when the air was hot and still like it was in Madison and one of my parents’ colleagues asked me what I thought I might major in and I said “history,” clearly and firmly, I embraced the world I grew up in for all it contains and all it is worth. Most children, I suppose, choose to reject their parents’ world and strike out into uncharted waters, and to them I wish all the best of luck. But as long as “uncharted waters” to me means a document lying undiscovered in an archive, a connection between texts never before made, a student’s mind not yet unlocked, or a degree not yet received or conferred, my permanent home is in ivory towers everywhere, more so than at college reunions or even than on the gay dancefloor.
I don’t yet know whether I’ll come back to Princeton for a reunion years hence, but I’m sure I would return to campus if I had black stripes on my sleeves from another institution, a tenure-track job, and a book on my CV; and if there were a conference in my field and I submitted a paper and wound up presenting it, sitting at last on the other side of the Dickinson 210 seminar table. It wouldn’t feel so much like a homecoming, back to “the best old place of all,” as like an extension of the same world which has always been and always will be my home, no matter which institution grants my degrees or gives me (I hope and pray) a job. For Princeton is not my home so much as academe is, and so I imagine that on a hot and humid summer day in a fantasy world years hence—when I’m working on my senior thesis, my dissertation, my first or my second book—I’ll feel the slightest stirrings of a breeze or see the cloudburst clouds gathering overhead, I’ll put down my book or cease typing for an instant, and I’ll think of summer in Madison.
The Queer Activist: A Brief Observation 17 April 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Princeton.3 comments
Over at Princeton’s new queer-community blog, my colleague Ryan has written a great, thoughtful post about making a career in queer activism work:
I feel extremely conflicted towards the LGBT movement establishment and question whether I want to make a career out of LGBT advocacy.
Before coming to Princeton, I was Director of Louisiana’s statewide LGBT advocacy organization, the Forum For Equality. It was an amazing and challenging experience — as one might expect, there are a unique set of priorities and obstacles for the movement in the American South. I am incredibly proud of my work at the Forum, and it seems natural for me to return to this type of work upon graduation.
But when I think of returning to work for LGBT issues, I wonder what is motivating me. Is it a sense of guilt or obligation? Should smart young gay people who are interested in politics feel as if they “must” work for LGBT rights? The LGBT community is a small minority, and those with elite educations are an even smaller minority. Who am I to turn my back on the movement that has allowed me to be who I am?
Ryan continues, asking (very saliently, I think) whether the developing world would be a better use of his talents, and implicitly noting how exhausting political advocacy work can be. But he didn’t note something else I think is important, which is that there is more than one way to be an activist. Deciding against a career in LGBT advocacy and policy, or advocacy and policy at all, does not mean turning your back on queer issues and being an advocate for queer visibility, acceptance, and civil rights. I consider myself a queer activist through my work at learning to be a historian and an educator, because someday I intend to make a career out of telling the stories of queer lives long ended, out of developing critical frameworks through which to examine the sexualities and identities and cultural movements of the past, and out of passing all this information on to a new generation of young folks whose lives were changed by learning about Harvey Milk or Stonewall and who are ready to learn so much more. Long after marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are decided in America, all around the world we will have a need for people to tell stories like the ones I am learning to tell—and, if necessary, perhaps to tell their own stories of their own lives too. Staying well-informed enough and staying accessible enough that when someone has a question about queer issues you can take a half-hour to answer it is a form of activism. Being out is a form of activism. And if all these things weren’t true, I wouldn’t be able to reconcile the life I want to lead with the principles I believe in.
And teaching—about queer stuff or not—is the greatest way that there is to make the world you believe in and dream of for the next generation.
Addendum: I see that a lot of people are coming to this blog from a College Confidential thread about the atmosphere for LGBT students at Princeton. If you’re a prospective Princeton student seeking information about LGBT life on campus, please feel free to contact me, and I will absolutely answer any questions you have.
The Productivity of Exhaustion; or, Doing Good Work 7 April 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Personal Life, Princeton.2 comments
We are always tired, here at Princeton. Whether I run into a professor in the street or a friend in the dining hall, and ask “How’s it going?” the answer is inevitably “Tired.” I have some friends who are so unremittingly tired that I can complete their complaints of exhaustion for them. Even the Dining Services employee who swipes my ID card when I enter the dining hall tells me every day that she’s tired. And I always respond in kind: I am downing cup after cup of coffee, taking off my glasses and rubbing my eyes in precept, writing this blog post, even, because after a succession of long days I am still trying to find the energy to engage with this essay I have to write about the Arabs and Turks in the early modern period. It’s a punishing world, this place, full of overscheduled 20-year-olds with bags under their eyes, all trying frantically to turn out the pages and pages of work that we’re expected to produce. I was talking to a friend last week about how little time two years is in which to turn out three pieces of original scholarship in our disciplines, and how difficult it is to write original scholarship under the constant pressure of exhaustion. At times, it seems as if Princeton is setting us up for failure: particularly as I look down the two years ahead of me and worry that even getting a year’s head start on my thesis will not permit me to turn in work of which I can be proud. It is difficult to enjoy college, or to enjoy being young, under these circumstances. Every day I find myself more becoming the monastic scholar whom I thought I wouldn’t resemble until I had a couple more degrees behind me—because here I am, reading and writing as best as I’m able under the circumstances, and always putting that first. You can’t have fun until your work is done—but at Princeton, your work is never done.
I write this not to complain, per se (yes, I am full aware of how overprivileged my life is), but in order to encourage myself to sublimate the constant pressure and constant rushing from place to place and constant high expectations into something intellectually useful. Were it, I think, not for the problem that you can’t think when you haven’t slept, I’d be fine: I have long sworn, if someone sardonically, by the intellectual benefits of a sort of masochistic impulse towards guilt and self-loathing, and this has been my route to self-satisfying output for nearly two years now. And yet I’m realizing that this can’t continue to be enough: the work is getting harder and the stakes are getting higher, and I wonder if I can continue to do good work when doing good work is such a balancing act. Like so many other students, all of us at our desks or in our carrels thinking the same thing, I feel as if I work so much harder than anyone else I know, and that it will never be enough to earn the professors’ accolades or my own self-respect, or—increasingly urgently—the professional success I crave. Because now, when I last-minute a paper, I have begun to tell myself that doing this won’t fly in graduate school, and now I have begun to sweat with terror. (Though mind you, graduate students of my acquaintance tend for whatever reason to be some of the least exhausted people I know.)
I am sure this conversation has been had many times on this campus in the intervening years since 1746, but I’d welcome a dialogue about the degree to which Princeton sets its students up, if not for failure, then for mediocrity. We all know that no one who turns in a thesis receives a failing grade, and that in fact 55% of seniors receive As on their independent work, but are we also providing circumstances in which students can healthily do good work? Or are we as a community rather asking them to sacrifice their friends and their free time for the sake of the original research we so touted as a reason these self-same students should study here instead of Harvard? As I hear about seniors turning in their theses these next couple weeks, I wonder about the degree to which an 80-page paper is a formality, and what the point is of requiring an 80-page paper as a formality. It seems a little ridiculous for writers and readers alike, and indeed the same logic can be applied to junior independent work, or to the shorter essays I write without the time for care and attention every week, or even down to the Blackboard posts we all last-minute or the reading we don’t do for precept. Is this the cruelty of our academic institution, the cherry on top of our own high standard? Or is there just something I’m missing? Is there a way to do it all and well, and still find time and energy and verve to embrace time languidly wasted in the onset of spring?
I know this is all on some level training for the rest of my life, when—if I hope to succeed in my profession—I must write many more pieces of scholarship and read many more pages and keep myself to a more punishing schedule of output than the one to which I am held now. But my mind still comes back to the same question, the question which I ask myself several times a day: in what time-bending universe is it possible to do well in six classes and write 80 good pages of original research in a single year?
Time for another cup of coffee. I haven’t prepped for class tomorrow.
Admissions (Out)reach; or, Policy Which Lends Itself to Ridiculous Puns 26 February 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Personal Life, Princeton.3 comments
My interests in LGBT issues and higher ed policy dovetailed recently (and yielded what I think is a great pun in the title of this post!) with the announcement that Penn will use applicants’ references to LGBT-related causes, activities, and identification to do outreach to queer students, much as college and university admissions frequently do for other minority groups, from students of color to women in science to scholar-athletes. And the awkward and silly thing about being involved in however small a capacity in institutional policy at an Ivy League school is that when you read about one Ivy League school changing a policy, you immediately wonder whether it’s something you could and should implement at your own school. (Well, I feel this way, anyway.) And so I feel moved to pose a question, dear reader: should Princeton follow Penn’s lead in tracking and doing outreach to LGBT applicants, and how should it do this?
Now, I’d argue that in my anecdotal experience Princeton is already helping LGBT applicants along with the other populations of “non-traditional” applicants which it helps. Half the reason I am now wondering what Princeton should be doing in this regard is because in April 2008, when I was a prospective student visiting Princeton for the weekend, my host brought me to an event at the LGBT Center. I may not have identified as gay then, or been as explicitly and consistently involved in LGBT community as I am now, but knowing that there was an LGBT Center at Princeton and that my host (who is not gay herself) wasn’t shy about going there or inviting me to come made me feel like I could be comfortable here. It was the entire reason I made my decision to come here—and I feel like there might have been some intent behind the hosting program pairing me with the host that they did. Similarly, now that I’m on the other side of the hosting process, I write in to tell the program that I’m interested in hosting LGBT students or anyone else apprehensive of coming to Princeton for social-politics-related reasons. Sometimes they go to Yale (not that I blame them), but sometimes they come here—and I think the fact that I’m the one who hosts them is far from coincidental, given the willingness that I express to host those kids.
And so when there are preferences expressed, the administration tends to heed them—because it’s in their best interests, and in accordance with their stated institutional policy to diversify undergraduate culture, to do so. And maybe this could be done to a greater extent—I don’t know to what extent undergrad admissions does specific outreach to members of other minority groups during the admissions office, so it would be hard for me to say whether they should adjust their policies to include LGBT students too. However, Negative Nancy that I am, I am more concerned about who will be left out by such a policy than who will be brought into the fold by it.
As most of my readers are probably aware, more and more teenagers are coming out in high school—or when they’re even younger! Some of my readers, I believe, are out high schoolers themselves, or were; some of my readers are straight allies involved in their schools’ GSAs or LGBT community life in the cities and towns where they live. LGBT youth culture is now a constituent part of LGBT culture as a whole, a recent and exciting development in the variegated experience of being queer in America. And yet for all that many teenagers are out, I’d go so far as to suggest that most aren’t. Most of the kids I know from high school who are now out in college didn’t go to GSA meetings or go to citywide queer-community events—hell, I certainly didn’t! Back in high school, I thought your sexual orientation wasn’t something you put on a college application. I thought it was something you talked about in furtive late-night AIM conversations, or knew in the back of your mind when you saw how uncannily you could relate to the characters in books you read. I’m not sure, when I was applying to colleges, if I would have answered an optional sexual orientation identification question, and if I had I probably would have hovered over the radio buttons such a question would no doubt require you to choose between. When I came to college, I starting identifying myself to others as “gay” instead of as “bisexual,” with intermittent spurts of asexuality in between. When I was 17, would I have been able to choose a radio button? Or would I have declined to, unsure which letter in “LGBT” best described me? Would I have declined to, unsure whether selecting any of them would have made me seem too “unprofessional” for a college application?
And this is me we’re talking about! Two years later, I’m the gayest of the gay at this college where I wound up, making a life out of nonchalantly throwing around the word “sodomy” at the dinner table. What about the others? How does the admissions office reach out to a kid who hasn’t come out to him- or her- or hirself, a kid who after two years in college still lives in fear of being found out? How does the admissions office reach out to the queer kids who are out, but who are so desperate not to make their outness a defining point of their identity that they would run away from such overtures of community? It’s a tricky line to navigate, that’s for sure—as tricky as are any of the lines we deal with when we create or don’t create queer community at Princeton.
I am reminded, once again, of the big gulf between knowing you’re different and knowing you’re queer, particularly when you’re sixteen or seventeen and being different is such an all-consuming torture that it’s hard to understand it as anything else or anything more sharply-defined. I am reminded, once again, of the time Before, the time when I was still trying to get a seat at the popular kids’ table—I hadn’t yet realized that it was possible to go start a table of my own. And I truly am not sure what I would have done, then, if Princeton had asked me to select a sexual orientation.
Well. With that, I’m off to talk about Mary Wollstonecraft’s attitude towards homoeroticism. High school, after all, was a full universe ago.
Memory, Time, and Woeful Insecurities; or, Blogging for Dummies 21 February 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Personal Life, Princeton.1 comment so far
Those of you who are Princeton students are no doubt aware of a certain Master of Rockefeller College given to holding forth to a large Facebook audience on life and literature and a combination of the two. A fan of his notes since I first became a member of his college 18 months ago, I’ve had particular reason in the past several weeks to slowly wade my way through his backlog. I’m just getting now to the ones he was writing my first few weeks here, and it’s quite strange to be reading these again in quite a different frame of mind. I remember, then, not understanding why I couldn’t understand what he was writing, why its meaning wasn’t immediately apparent to me. I remember feeling lost, as lost as I felt in my French class, when I didn’t understand the teacher; in meetings for the student publication I briefly wrote for, when I wasn’t as charismatic or articulate as the other writers; and out at Terrace on Saturday nights, when I sat alone in a corner and played with my iPod. I loathed myself: for being so stupid, for failing to integrate seamlessly into a foreign culture so far removed from my California public high school. I phoned my parents in tears and begged to come home for fall break.
But now it’s the second time around, the second read. I quit the publication; I stopped going to Terrace. I never stopped feeling stupider than all my classmates, and sometimes it still drives me to tears—but it’s all redeemed when I get good feedback from a professor, as occasionally I do. I have friends, good ones. And far from sitting in a corner in a well of shyness and discomfort and fear, I’ve discovered that what I do best is talk. I talk in precept, I talk on this blog and on Facebook, I talk in committee meetings, I talk at parties and study breaks, I talk when I’m at home—in the Rocky dining hall, that is. I talk about eating clubs, about how it seems like everyone at this university is in the closet, about Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, about why the American political system is going to hell in a handbasket. And I’ve found out that when you talk enough, people expect you to do things. I’ve been asked to help start organizations and publications, to make things happen, to change the world.
When I talk on this blog, more often than not, it comes back to haunt me. I am not democratically (little-d!) impartial; I do not withhold my political views about my community or about the United States. I get pushback for being one of them legacies, for example, and a post I wrote back in September about dominant Princeton culture has gotten a disconcertingly large amount of mileage. I have tried, as a result, to write less about my life, to bitch a little less, to engage more intellectually with my world. I have tried to make myself think and to make other people think—and if I am going to bitch, I try to bring a method to my bitchiness. As I have learned to write about history, I have blogged about history. As I have learned to write about literature, I have blogged about literature. And as I have learned to engage with the world as an adult, I have blogged about that process too.
Sometimes I think that to an outside reader, my posts must seem as impenetrable as a certain college master’s did to me 18 months ago—except that mine are not impenetrable in a way that makes the reader want to learn how to read them properly! And sometimes I wonder whether the ethics of my blogging are appropriate, whether I do the right thing to mix the academic so inextricably with the personal, whether I do the right thing to be so forthcoming about the private angst that dogs my days. Does the world need to know that I am still, after 18 months, resolutely tortured by insecurity and guilt and shame at my failure to perform to academic heights? Does the world care how terrified I am that it seems as if my entire life hangs in the balance of one single professional goal which has become near-impossible to achieve?
Reader, I think all this angst must serve some instrumental purpose. It has to. It has to because writing is the road through angst, and has always been—but it also is a declaration that the rhythm of weekends (Thursday night drinking, Friday morning hangover, Saturday night drinking, Sunday morning hangover, Sunday night spent catching up on the weekend’s work) is meaningless to those who have spent their whole weekends in the library. It is a reminder that if seeking validation and self-worth in a dominant social culture that alienates you isn’t working out, you can after all these years of insecurity and self-loathing find a reason for being in books and in words, in writing and in talking. Of course, there are perils in this approach, the foremost being that now if you feel as if you’ve turned in sub-par written work, or if you gave a strange professor a first impression of stupidity and inanity, you’re disconsolate for days. Now you risk being formed only by what you have done, and thus it is imperative that you do Enough, and it is never possible to do Enough. And no matter how well the life of the mind works out, that much time spent tracing the same path between bedroom, dining hall, library, and coffeeshop, and pacing back and forth across 120 square feet of life above an early-20th-century Gothic-revival archway, can get just a little claustrophobic.
But do you know why it’s okay? It’s because you’re just twenty years old and you know that you’ve already discovered your reason for being. You read and read and talk and talk and slowly the secrets of great texts are unlocked; slowly you permeate the surface of those once impermeable Facebook notes. You read. And you talk. And most days you go to bed exhausted, depressed, dissatisfied with yourself. But some days, when the sun shines just right through the windows of your mostly-subterranean library refuge, and you’re listening to Tchaikovsky and drinking your coffee and suddenly the blank verse you’re reading makes so much sense that you have to scramble for pen and paper to note it down—then you remember why you’re doing this, why the greatest and lasting joy is to be found in what you do, what you were—in some sense—fated to do. What you’ve known since you were thirteen that you would do. It’s then, in those single, singular moments, that you know beyond any reasonable doubt that you’ve sold your soul to the ivory tower—and that you never, ever want to leave.
Anglo-Catholicism, Reason, and the Artificiality of Natural Law; or, Andrew Sullivan Comes to Princeton 19 February 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, LGBT, Politics/Current Affairs, Princeton.add a comment
When I decided to shirk my duty as a Professional Gay(TM) and to back out of attending IvyQ, a pan-Ivy League undergraduate queer issues/politics conference, I was mostly just worried about getting my schoolwork done this weekend—but I then was met with the unexpected pleasure of being able to go see Andrew Sullivan speak instead. Sullivan, who was Princeton’s guest as part of its public lecture series, was without question the perfect person to speak to the political climate which characterizes and divides Princeton’s discourse around LGBT issues. Much as the current national political discourse coalesces around a radical fringe right and everyone else—liberal or conservative—who disagrees with them (and must therefore do so in a moderately conservative sense), Princeton’s LGBT-politics climate consists of a radical fringe right, as represented in the Anscombe Society and its allies in the faculty; and of Everyone Else. All these people, whatever disparate political and policy-oriented outcomes they may desire for the status of LGBT people at Princeton and for the status of LGBT people in America, find themselves united in the fight to dismiss Anscombe on principle. And it took Sullivan to stand on the stage in McCosh 50 and start on the new natural lawyers’ own turf before unravelling their arguments, to come from an intensely Catholic perspective before repudiating rhetorical opponents who come from an equally intensely Catholic perspective, to cite Gerard Manley Hopkins and Cardinal Newman, Aquinas and Aristotle and Foucault, and infuse a coldly pro forma debate with intellectualism and emotion.
Now: don’t get me wrong. I disagree with wide swathes of what Andrew Sullivan believes, about queer politics in particular (though also no less importantly about certain generalizations and assertions which could read as racist and sexist, though those, while no less reprehensible, are perhaps less interesting to pick apart). He spent a good portion of his talk critiquing the “queer liberationist” position, one with which I to a certain extent identify (emotionally, if not pragmatically in 2010). I disagree very sharply first with Sullivan’s reading of Foucault to support the idea that queer liberationists do not believe there is something immutable about sexual orientation—why can there not be immutability at some biological level, but also the constructed and created structures of society which imbue that immutability with very different significances over time, and why can we not distinguish biological sexual orientation from the social constructs of gay or queer culture? Sullivan’s argument overall, as no doubt many of you, dear readers, know, is essentially an assimilationist one (I put no negative connotation on “assimilationist”) and mine is, while not entirely separatist, certainly an argument which critiques assimilationism from the left. That said, however, thank any god or none for someone standing on a Princeton stage and presenting a viewpoint with which I can disagree rationally, which is not motivated at its core by homophobia! What a breath of fresh air!
Someday, I am going to puzzle out the complex sociality of Princeton LGBT culture enough to understand truly what the significance was of Sullivan’s talk to Princeton; someday, too, I will have read enough 19th-century intellectual history to be able to do more than just vaguely nod at allusions to the homoeroticism of Anglo-Catholicism, a sort of cultural-history principle that could be said to have underlain much of what Sullivan had to say. Both these things are certainly on my agenda for the months and years ahead.
But far from my expectation that I would be irritated by a position with which I, as a liberal and a queer liberal at that, fundamentally disagree, I was both intrigued and thankful. Princeton, no matter what policies its administration may or may not espouse, is at its heart a conservative institution, much like any other old Anglo or Anglo-inspired university very much rooted in a notion of tradition or nostalgia. An English conservative who nevertheless prizes intellect and reason is just who it needs to access the still-closed minds who hamper a more productive dialogue on this campus. And now, as I go back to reading history, to writing history, and to having the conversations and writing the essays, articles, and blog posts I need to in order to change hearts and minds on this campus, I only hope that the rest of tonight’s audience was as intrigued by what Andrew Sullivan had to say as I was.
