Middlebury is hard. I have found attending this college to be challenging and exciting, and my experience here has shown me that learning for the sake of itself may be the most rewarding of adventures. This adventure can be characterized as leisure: we are lucky to have this opportunity to study, to contemplate, to wonder, to imagine and to hypothesize. But I have also found Middlebury to aid and abet an unhealthy conception of success, as perhaps it must if it wants to be competitive as a globally leading liberal arts brand name. The importance of brand recognition at Middlebury creates an a-liberal environment that requires us to focus on achieving “success” rather than focusing on the health of our souls. We should strive for leisure, but also recognize that our investment in Middlebury as a brand poses an obstacle to the leisure for which we might wish.
A Middlebury professor once noted that we spend an inordinate amount of money to pay for college, and that if the purpose is to secure a higher income thirty years down the line, it is too much. But if we are not just being filled up with facts and prestige, and rather our souls are being turned away from the shadows and towards knowledge of the good, then the high cost might just be a bargain. Liberal education should teach students not just how to act but to act with “firmness in the right.” It should give students knowledge regarding how they should act once they leave the ivory tower.
My present understanding of the liberal arts indicates that we should search for knowledge by confronting unanswerable questions, including that most important one: how do I live well? As human beings, we are uniquely qualified to take part in this quest. Allan Bloom once wrote, “Man is the particular being that can know the universal, the temporal being that is aware of eternity, the part that can survey the whole, the effect that seeks the cause.” “Seeking our cause”- – well, if this doesn’t sound like leisure of the most important variety, I don’t know what does.
However, I am unconvinced that this sort of activity happens regularly at Middlebury. I find it unlikely that all classes seek insight into the human condition or broach the question of what it means to act with integrity or justice. The current inadequacy of our honor code confirms that Middlebury does not succeed in teaching virtue. In many classes I have taken at Middlebury, we look at things that seem good or bad, and we look at the systems that create these good or bad situations. However, we don’t always ask why something that seems good is good. We deal with the parts, not the whole.
While I admit to seeking the whole rather than the parts in some of my classes, it is not just the content but also the form that forces me to question whether my liberal arts education has been one characterized by leisure. Sure, when I read a beautifully worded sentence or explore a complicated concept, sometimes I feel something within me shift. When this happens, I am reminded of this crazy idea – that I might have a soul, and that learning here at Middlebury might be what nourishes it. But I also know that when I am in the library and I hear the lady on the loudspeaker say that it will close in 15 minutes because it is 12:45pm and I still have to memorize the names of Roman consuls and power through 200 more pages of so-called beautiful and soul-affirming literature – well, when that happens I no longer have the time or energy to verify its lofty reputation for myself. Because Middlebury doesn’t just ask us to seek, but also to prove that we have sought.
Emily Bogin '16 is from Larkspur, California.
