If you visit the “About” page on Middlebury’s website, you will find that “[Middlebury graduates] should be independent thinkers, committed to service, with the courage to follow their convictions and to accept responsibility for their actions.”
Tangentially, (or conversely?), if you visit the first page of the “Admissions” section on Middlebury’s website, you will learn that Midd describes itself as “highly selective ... Most students rank in the top 10 percent of their high school classes.”
If you ended up at Middlebury, you probably self-identify, to at least some extent, as an academic achiever. Commendably, the ways in which Middlebury students define “academic achievement” vary in depth and breadth. Cultivating diversity of thought is one of the most valuable pursuits of liberal arts colleges. Middlebury students and their talents are undeniably extraordinary. But I think the ways in which the message of “extraordinariness” is reinforced ought to cause us to pause.
In his essay entitled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” William Deresiewicz, reflecting upon a combined two dozen years at Columbia and Yale, writes: “The last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy ... Elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them ... We were ‘the best and the brightest,’ as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright … ”
So much of the Middlebury experience revolves around an achievement-oriented narrative. I don’t care if this is a narrative you subscribe to or vocally reject – it’s still a pervasive narrative. It lurks behind the text of every CCI email advertising recruitment opportunities and career workshops. It is assumed in the classroom. It stares us in the face each time a “falling GPA” witticism is attempted on YikYak (read too often.) We are provided with a diverse array of avenues through which to put our high-achieving selves to use. There’s nothing strictly wrong with achievement being a defining component of our Middlebury experience. But there is something wrong with this being the only component of our Middlebury experience.
There are numerous ways to look at a Middlebury career. One version is just that – a career. It involves exacting as much influence, sway and exchange-value as one possibly can from the opportunities offered by this college. It involves a meticulously crafted resume and an untarnished GPA. It involves viewing Middlebury as a system to play – a mere stepping-stone on the path to “what’s next.”
I’m not as concerned with the nature of “what’s next” as I am with the very focus upon it. The person who aspires to be an executive at Goldman Sachs does not necessarily or more powerfully exemplify this problem than the person who longs to open a thoughtfully curated bookstore in Portland. Regardless of your dream, a solely future-oriented outlook merits some reflection.
I will not argue that one can entirely avoid the narrative of “what’s next,” or should for that matter. We attend an expensive institution of higher education and our tuition dollars do translate roughly to an investment in ourselves and, tangentially, in the development of future careers. But I will argue that we spend so much time worrying about who we’ll be at 26, or 46, that we forget to be 20.
As Deresiewicz writes, “Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college – all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value.”
If you’re a student at Midd, you have probably, at some point in your academic career, received grades that reinforced your sense of self worth – grades that perhaps told you: “You can do anything.” And therein lies the problem, I think. We are a community of achievers operating within an institution telling us that not only can we do anything, but that the institution concretely possesses the resources to “make it happen.” And so we take the narrative of “you can do anything,” and accidentally try to do everything.
Our faculty met last week in the wake of a turbulent semester to discuss stress levels at this college. And rightly so. In his essay, “The Organization Kid,” David Brooks, describing the reflections of a group of Princeton students in the early 2000s, writes: “One, a student-government officer, said, ‘Sometimes we feel like we’re just tools for processing information. That’s what we call ourselves – power tools. And we call these our tool bags.’ He held up his satchel. The other students laughed, and one exclaimed, ‘You’re giving away all our secrets.’”
Roughly a decade later, the analogy rings true. We, as a collective student body, possess remarkable processing power. We are entirely capable of becoming high-achieving students of this college, high-achieving graduates and high-achieving members of the workforce. But a nontrivial question remains: At what cost?
An optimistic sentiment holds true – the opportunities afforded by this college are tremendous, and there’s so much we can do here. But we must stop trying to do too much. Power-tools are certainly rewarded for their behavior. But maybe, from time to time, step back. Choose your friends, choose your mental health, choose the little kid in town who needs a babysitter, choose the book that’s not on your syllabus. These, too, are rewarding undertakings.
As Deresiewicz writes, “Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it.” I will not say that the capacity to achieve should be cast aside. But I’d much rather spend these years of my semi-youth with a community of, as Middlebury itself advertises, “independent thinkers ... with the courage to follow their convictions” than one-dimensional power tools. Wouldn’t you?
