The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola

There’s college, and there’s college. Both are decidedly American concepts.
When I told my teachers at my international school in Switzerland that I would be attending Columbia, they handed me reading lists. My classmates reacted differently­—their image of American college was more Animal House than academia. They begged me not to turn into a fat sorority girl with a drinking problem and lamented the fact that I would soon be sharing a small double room with a field hockey player from Virginia Beach.

Both were right. I’ve learned a lot—there have also been nights I don’t remember. Orientation week felt more like summer camp than university, and disillusion set in the 37th time I told a classmate that no, I did not speak Swiss, or Swedish for that matter. I came to realize that college in America comes with a choice: college vs. college. You can choose college and spend your nights studying and drinking coffee while making connections between existentialism and punk rock, or you can chose college and stumble into class still wearing pajamas and use the presidential debates as an excuse to take shots at every use of the word “terrorist.”
Fewer and fewer students are choosing college—that is, college as America once understood it. This is because America as the world once understood it—a country open to free thought, free speech and progressive individualism—has become more akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which utopia is achieved by erasing all contemplative traditions in favor of sterility and hedonism. Today, intellectualism is acknowledged only in the form of geek-chic and activists are told to “get real” by their straight-laced peers, partly because of the deadbeat hippie stereotype (thanks, Dad), but also because of society’s increasing materialism. Personal growth and engaged, informed discourse have no value if they aren’t financially viable.

I understand those who choose college. It’s much easier to settle with a cubicle and a generous salary if you’ve never read Marx or thought about what happiness really means. The pressure to succeed in this country is crippling: the prevalence of depression (affecting up to 15 percent), eating disorders (20 percent), sleeping problems (20 percent), and alcohol abuse and dependence (31 percent) are all evidence that college students aren’t functional humans as much as well-rounded bags of nerves held together by prescription drugs and pop culture slogans. College is presented as a last chance: these are supposed to be the best four years of your life, so you’d better not waste any of that precious time sober. The thrill is in the chase: once you get into the college of your choice, you’re left burned out and apathetic. And this generation didn’t even have to pass tests to get into kindergarten.

The college mentality is seldom encouraged by the schools themselves, but rather by the apolitical institutions that take advantage of students: spring break, Girls Gone Wild, homecoming, and beer pong have become the new college because unlike dissent, dispute, and revolution, they put little at stake. When some risk arises—future employers checking Facebook, hazing, alleged sexual violence under the influence of alcohol, or, God forbid, a protest—it is quickly rectified with online privacy settings, rules, court-cases, and more rules that college is more than happy to comply with. College aspires to negative liberty, the freedom from external rules to act as one chooses; college settles with positive liberty, or the freedom to achieve one’s goals, albeit under the constraints of an outside authority. Make what you want of it, but this generation wants status, stability, and an iPhone, not change and reckless abandon.

Columbia does not offer the metaphorical basket-weaving course and has a respectable Core Curriculum, but I’m still overwhelmed by how little students care about, well, college. Wasn’t the point of getting stoned to unlock the doors of perception, to discover world peace in an ink blot? If so, why are we sitting comatose in front of a pizza and Family Guy? It breaks my heart to see so many of my friends and classmates, once so passionate about journalism or abstract mathematics, spend more time in an investment bank than lost in thought or conversation. And the worst part is that I can’t blame them for it, as I could have 40 years ago. College, and on a macro level, this entire country, leaves intellectualism outside the résumé unrewarded.

College is the problem with college. It is this college which causes students to be satisfied with the “gentleman’s” C+, but also to opt for an easy A over an educated B. Both are symptoms of the greater problem: college is merely a means to an end, and seldom experienced as an end in itself. Like flower power, punk, and countless other social phenomena turned marketing plans, the college that defined a generation is reduced to a slogan on a T-shirt: college. No name. No place. No identity. Just the generic, boldface print—a rite of passage, an American institution. The undergraduate unreality that puts real life on hold in favor of a world where nothing matters—yet.