Every fall I teach a first-year seminar called “Why College? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.” On the first day of class I present a list of possible purposes for college and ask students to rank them. “Finding your passion” and “changing the world” are always the top vote-getters, because that is the story we tell about college. Welcoming the new students at convocation, the president declares that they can do whatever they want with their lives, so they should do something they love. And they are also reminded to live for others, not just for themselves. At the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach, that inevitably means trotting out the school’s favorite quote from its famous founder. “The noblest question in the world is, ‘What good may I do in it?’” Benjamin Franklin asked. I wish that was the real point of college, and so do the students. But we both know better. The point is to get ahead, and to win the game. That means giving the teacher (in this case, me) the answer that he wants to hear. And outside of class, it means competing for every trophy in sight. Indeed, the competition is what produces the value. A few years ago, a student told my seminar that she had “tried out” for the Alzheimer’s Buddies Club — which sends people to visit patients in nearby hospitals — but that she didn’t “get in.” When she applied, she said, she had to submit an essay explaining why she wanted to participate; then she had to undergo an interview with an officer in the organization, who quizzed her about her “motivations” and “qualifications” for the role. Her story saddened me. I told the class that I didn’t think Penn should sponsor a group that winnowed people so selectively for a volunteer opportunity. It’s a free country, I said, and if students wanted to test and interview each other, that was their own business. But if they wanted Penn’s imprimatur — and its money — that was a different story. Everyone who wished to volunteer should be able to do so; and if more people applied than the hospital could accommodate, they should draw lots to decide who went. Students looked down at their notebooks, avoiding my gaze, and the room got quiet. Finally someone broke the silence. “If they did that,” a brave student explained, “nobody would apply.” Never mind the poignant essay about Grandma and her descent into dementia, or the resumé (the Alzheimer’s club required those, too) showing that you visited nursing homes in high school. The point, again, is to win. And if the game is too easy, there is no point at all. As you proceed through college, the stakes get higher. The next shiny object is the post-graduation job, ideally in finance, tech, or management consulting. At last count, sixty percent of Penn’s students entered one of these three fields. We tell them to find their passions and to change the world. But somehow, after four years here, over half of them choose the same thing. Many of them — probably most of them — are not passionate about it. And does anyone seriously believe that sending more people from Penn to Wall Street will make the world a better place? It’s not about that. We have socialized these young people for a Hobbesian war of all against all, where everyone battles for a scarce good. And we rarely — if ever — challenge them to reflect on whether it really is good, and for whom. That’s on us. The campus protests last spring over Israel and Palestine — and the related incidents of antisemitism — have occasioned another bout of handwringing about the moral state of our students. This is as old as America itself; from the start, adults have worried about whether the kids are alright. But today’s anxieties have the wrong focus. The big problem at college is not political correctness, or wokeness, or racism, or antisemitism. The big problem is cynicism, spawned by an institution that tells young people one thing and does the opposite. If we truly believed our rhetoric about individual exploration and collective uplift, we would structure college
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