It’s a renter’s market in New York, full of good deals, so when the time came for me to find summer housing, I gravitated towards the best deal of all, a Residential Advisor position. RAs are not obligated to have obligations. They are straw men appointed by the University to keep order, with no authority in themselves. They’re basically like elementary school sergeants-at-arms, figurehead bouncers, except their positions are also pleasantly remunerative—assuming, of course, they’re not already on financial aid.
My RA application consisted of two prompts: “tell us about your leadership positions” and (here I paraphrase) “delineate a conflict you resolved.” Essentially, I was to extol my internal virtues as they were seen by others.
Why is it that all human resources grunts are insipid women who grow frumpy in their twenties? For some reason—and this was true for my first job interview, too—I lacked the charm needed to get these people to do what I want them to do for me, which is all they’re good for. I didn’t get so much as a first-round interview.
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Some alienation is implicit when someone applies for a power position. Nobody’s vocation is being an RA—job interviews have an insidious way of making you want the job. These things force you to take them on their own terms, regardless of how absurd they are. In short, they force you to care about them.
This is a shame, because college should be a time of life free of such forces. In most places, it is: my travels along the Eastern seaboard have brought me into contact with the carefree people of Amherst, the stoners of Swarthmore, the self-satisfied security of Harvard. When I spoke to Mark Rudd, icon of Columbia’s ’68 student insurrection, he said that jobs were outside the immediate purview of most of his contemporaries. As recently as four decades ago, students here viewed college as an end in itself, though not something so sacred as to preclude the possibility of protest and retribution.
A summation of popular discontentment regarding Columbia might go: it spurs desires within its students that most can never fulfill. Of course, the only thing worse than not achieving these goals is achieving them.
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At Columbia much ado is made of our fragmented community, our lack of esprit de corps. Student government is our closest simulacrum of something that unites the entire campus, though student government in college is even more ridiculous than student government in, say, high school, where the ratio of prestige and rep to responsibility was infinite. This is nothing compared to the benefits ex officio here. The same ratio holds, but there is more of a pretense towards responsibility: because it should matter, it must. Then, suddenly, it actually does matter—a position listed on the resume begets another position, and suddenly the same people who send you shockingly lifeless e-mails once a week are reviewing your resume, self-determined, to thine own self true, and hopelessly irrelevant.
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“The Columbia College Student Council exists to boost the ego of those elected and allow these few select students to pad their resumes with impressive sounding leadership titles. They accomplish very little in their time on said student council and the little they do accomplish is inflated tremendously. ...” This is from a mass missive by George Krebs, president emeritus of Columbia College. At first this kind of talk is charismatic—our leaders are self-aware enough to discern criticisms. And then you realize it’s like that guy who wears the unironic Harvard jacket—the unbuttoned depravity makes you remember why self-effacement is the norm when people ask you what college you attend. The rest of the e-mail, convoluted and weasely, strengthens instead of dispels the bold and straightforward truth of these opening lines.
If I had to do my RA application all over again, I’d answer the first prompt by saying “A leader is someone too unimaginative to direct his own life,” after which I would have made stuff up—better to lie on your resume than having your entire résumé be a lie. It is so easy to lie to yourself at Columbia. What most people define as ambition seems to be living up to nebulous, external expectations, but being liked by others is a lousy substitute for liking yourself.
Our Core is an elaborate exercise in self-justification, our admissions game is arbitrary and absurd, our politicians are as vapid and gutless as Barack Obama, our campus publications exist for the same reason as student council. The prime accomplishment listed on your résumé is that you listed something on your resume. Some are content to have a resume do justice to their personality—a column will have to do the same for me. I was going to end with a riff about how broken systems produce broken people, and how Columbia’s gift to the world is people who hate it, but maybe we’re not so different after all.
Chris Morris-Lent is a Columbia College junior majoring in English. Blood, Toil, Tears & Sweat runs alternate Thursdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com