In 2014 I was hired, for two consecutive spring semesters, to teach writing and literature at one of the officially happiest colleges in America. The place was located in a beatific, temperate environment, with mountain views and imposing, elegant architecture; extraordinary foliage and trees burst from the very pavement, flowers were everywhere. There were outdoor swimming pools, conveniently placed grills and fountains, the latter to be drunkenly danced in on graduation or really whenever somebody felt like it. Upbeat music emitted from invisible speakers, wafting constantly across enormous athletic fields; artistic performances and lectures were available almost every day or night. The faculty were erudite, dedicated, and inspiringly strange. Students were receptive, hard-working, and very well-prepared; they were the best undergrads I had ever encountered. They were also, with few exceptions, remarkably easy-going. There was something intimidating about the opulence of the place, and also a little eerie; to me, that kind of apparent perfection invariably holds the secret of its inevitable ruin. I knew it was perverse to feel that way in the midst of a wonderful opportunity for which I was grateful — but I did feel that way, almost on arrival. The stark rectilinearity of the architecture, the Triumph of the Will plazas, the huge terraced terracotta buildings — if you aren’t used to that scale of things it is disorienting, especially if you are the only human walking the huge expanse between the huge structures. So, at the end of what turned out to be a lovely semester, when one of my favorite students, a kid from India named Chetan (not his real name; all names in this essay have been changed) caustically informed me that this was “the happiest college in America” and that it got on his nerves, I sincerely replied, “Yeah, I know what you mean. What’s wrong with them?” But whatever was wrong wasn’t wrong with all of them; some people apparently were not so happy at all. By the fall of 2015, the Dean of Students had been essentially forced to resign after a humongous campus-wide protest about her alleged racial insensitivity, which somehow got combined (in the media) with a Facebook photo of two grinning blonde students in Halloween costumes that featured ponchos, sombreros, and glued-on mustaches. A quivering apparatus sprang up to attack the unhappiness: more multicultural clubs, more diverse hiring, a mentoring program, and an administrator to oversee diversity came into being. But when I returned for another engagement in 2019 I noticed that students were no longer so easy-going: they were positively touchy. A higher percentage per class needed mental-health disability dispensations and a couple of students had to take time off due to breakdowns. During the semester a student published an essay in the school paper titled “On Being Unhappy at One of the Happiest Colleges in America.” The writer identified his experience of racism as the source of his discontent, but towards the end of his piece he broadened his focus to note that the happiness itself could create mental health stress across the student body. He mentioned the deaths of two white male students that had occurred within the same week that year, one a suicide, the other a drug overdose. An anecdote about those deaths that is minor but which seems relevant: in conjunction with mass counseling services and a candlelit remembrance, a community gathering was also held featuring a free food truck, board games, and coloring supplies. Fast forward to 2021. The unhappiness was continuing its upward creep, for obvious reasons: the pandemic, the exponentially growing climate crisis, political madness culminating in the attack on the Capitol, the ever louder voice of white nationalism, the murder of George Floyd, the vicious street attacks on Asian people which seemed to loom larger and more horrible in contrast with the extra anti-racist vigilance on campus. Anyone who isn’t living in off-grid isolation is aware of the tireless efforts by hyper-conscious campus administrations to create classrooms where everyone feels safe and as few people as possible will be made “uncomfortable,” let alone unhappy. Some institutions require “trigger warnings” to be announced before “problematic” material is read, and some classic texts might not be taught at all — for example, professors of literature might hesitate to include a story by Flannery O’Connor (featuring the n-word) on their syllabus. Title IX protects everyone from rape or harassment, and mandatory training “modules” educate faculty about proper codes of conduct and speech. In response to the stressors listed above, the response at the now less-happy campus was to double down on such efforts: fewer white male authors on the syllabus, please, and more instructional modules on how to engage students over Zoom, more anti-racist teacher trainings, more refinements of language (the n-word should not be uttered aloud for any reason by any not-black person, not even if the person is reading it from a hundred-year-old text), more polls on how more diversity might be achieved. Such strenuous gesticulation has been so widely mocked (even by academics who do it) that it is easy to forget why it started. Campus assaults and sometimes horrific drunken rapes were a part of campus life for decades and I don’t doubt that they still occur. (For a recent example, see the Hobart and William Smith frat rape, 2014.) In the almost thirty years in which I have taught as a visitor at various universities, I have witnessed or heard about disgusting and demoralizing racial insults (in 2005, for example, a program on the student TV station at Syracuse University featured images of an actual lynching on a comedy show) as well as the more subtly painful experience of isolation faced by minority groups — experience that professors could unintentionally exacerbate or not notice or not know how to address if they did notice. But still, even people outraged by such cruelties might fairly mock the corrective apparatus, not only because it is ridiculous (which it often is) or dictatorial (which it often
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence