SLC Life: Community and collective activity vs. the individual

by Aidan Leahy

Tuesday February 19, 2008

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, offers an interesting insight into the typical life of college campuses. Though the article focuses on intimate relationships, its themes explore some broadly pertinent issues. Why are we at college? What are we getting out of the experience? And, Who are we becoming?
The Journal article suggests that we are placing our careers and our work ahead of ourselves—ahead of our personal satisfaction. Hooking-up, they suggest (and everyone knows) has superceded dating, and students are more interested in preparing for careers and the necessary academic degrees than they are in fulfilling romantic desires.

Students today are stressed-out and can not handle another person closely entwined in their lives. We do not know what we are doing with the rest of our lives, and we do not even know in what city we will end up being able to attend graduate school or find a job.

At the heart of the issue is fragmentation in our society. Sarah Lawrence values individuality very highly, but we need to ask about the cost of extreme individuality. At the Jan. 30 Student Life Committee meeting Max Neely-Cohen suggested that “we need to be depressed” during the long winters on campus. It is necessary, he said, for our creativity and scholarly pursuits. Underlying this notion is the presumption that happiness and sociability are antithetical to scholarship; community has little value in creativity and understanding the world.

Community and collective activity are left out when individuals are removed from their social context. Depressed, lonely students may produce impressive individual work, but what is the ultimate achievement? Could more be achieved by these individuals if they were to participate openly in campus discussions with like-minded students? Could they learn more by engaging opposing points of view on a more regular basis? Could the college become a platform for expressing senior views more effectively than individuals? And if so, would the views of some students be stifled?

Inevitably, advocating a particular idea means suppressing some views in favor of others. The question for Sarah Lawrence, being debated by a small minority of the members of the college behind an open but little-used door is: what is Sarah Lawrence? They are asking the questions we should all be asking. Mary Spellman, Dean of Student Affairs, asked the Committee if we, as a school, are too concerned with protecting individual rights at the expense of the rights of a greater part of the community. To repeat one of the best examples of this phenomenon on campus, taken from a past Student Life discussion: should we protect the rights of smokers to litter because they like to flick their cigarette butts, or should we keep the campus clean?

While the above example may be contentious, a more generalized description is: should you be able to do whatever you want, no matter how it affects others, and if so, should other people be able to do whatever they want, no matter how it affects you? The students of this college are too intelligent to ignore these fundamental questions, and the answers are the basis for our society.