World’s unFair

I first visited the Center for Career Education as a junior when I decided it was finally time to dispense with my inborn West Coast sloth and join the ranks of interns, serfs, and others exchanging labor for opportunity. Surely someone would hire me. I had mastered the admissions essay, the opinion column, and the academic paper—the cover letter would be a form that came easy to me. Not only would I tell them how brilliant I was, I would show them, too. I wrote a dozen over winter break, dispatched them to various offices from Battery Park to Central Park, and twiddled my thumbs. From this I learned at least two important lessons. The first is that if you don’t argue your own case on your own behalf, nobody else will argue it for you. I consider this to be the most important thing college has taught me.

The second is that people will rarely value you for who you are. My covey of cover letters netted a single interview at a bland, corporate publishing house. After polishing my resume with the help of a CCE adjunct (who, in our meeting, grew more animated and enthused as my statements became more platitudinous), I went to the company’s Midtown offices. A zaftig HR lady, at her late twenties middle-aged, greeted me and asked some questions. I answered with reasonable accuracy and moderate effusion. I didn’t hear back.

It was only later that I discovered how woefully hackneyed and representative my story was. You knew where this was going from the beginning, but I didn’t. According to a recent New York Times article, the ratio between seekers of work and job openings has approached a record six to one.

The true trauma for the “creative class” wasn’t in the loss of jobs or income—it was the theft of dignity, and the erosion of the foundation on which these professionals had based their lives, that hurt. To use some college words, the change was ‘metaphysical.’ Everyone underwent ‘metanoia.’

This was true for me, too. I had, after all, been homecoming king and nearly valedictorian in high school, gotten into Columbia, attained decent grades, made friends, had sex, won a Spectator column, and improved my writing. The real world would be, if not my oyster, then at least my bitch, and it was something to worry about later.

How mistaken I was in every regard. My best, for the first time, wasn’t good enough. It mattered that I hadn’t started looking two years before. It mattered that I’d majored in English. It mattered that I’d taken a year to get used to collegiate academics, and it mattered that I’d flunked my calculus final. It mattered less that I was smart and more that I hadn’t tried—there will always be someone who wants something more than you. And I would be the real world’s bitch before, if ever, the relationship could be righted.
Regret and neurosis seeped into my life in a way they hadn’t before. I rationalized: it didn’t matter that I was spending my summer reading and hanging out; that’s how summer should be spent, and I still think that. It did matter to me that I was unable to manipulate them into giving me what I wanted. If I was really as smart as I’d thought, I should have been able to charm them to my will. I couldn’t, so I wasn’t.

Richard Yates, whose “Revolutionary Road” is (after “Bartleby” and maybe “American Psycho”) the best fiction about the New York working world (and Columbia’s relation to it), had a character say this to a Barnard English student in a later novel—“Good. You’ll read a lot of good books … You’ll live in the world of ideas for four whole years before you have to concern yourself with anything as trivial as the demands of workaday reality—that’s what’s nice about college.”

How absurd this sounds, and Yates (a very funny, bitter man) must have known it. What is absurd in 1976 is much more so in 2009. We not only have a Center for Career Education for dealing with the trivia of ‘workaday reality,’ we have a Career Fair too. As I was back home in Seattle to recover from an operation, I missed it. For scores of our classmates—the majority, maybe—this is the culminating event of college. The Fair is the world, and the world is fair to them. It is always the ones who have learned nothing that get the job (or is it the converse?).

New York represents an ugly kind of logical conclusion to capitalism, where self-interest is a destructive force and every experience affirms one’s preconceptions. What matters here is not who you are but what you do, and what a black inversion of collegiate ideals this is.

Chris Morris-Lent is a Columbia College senior majoring in English. Politics, Sex, and Religion runs alternate Thursdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com