Where to Stick Your Passion for Learning

Last year, I offered my readers unsolicited advice on maintaining an acceptable public image through class participation. This year, I will apply my dubious expertise to the culinary practices that go into baking the cake on which class participation is the proverbial icing. (If you are a science major whose only pleasure in fulfilling distribution requirements is affirming the superiority of your discipline, you have nothing to learn from me/people.)

1. You don’t have a lot of work. There are obvious advantages to claiming you are busy; the danger is believing it. With the exception of a notorious dullard or two in each department who decides to wage war on behalf of his outmoded generation, Middlebury professors assign very manageable amounts of work. Moreover, few of them expect you to do 100 percent of it. In high school, stupid kids with good memories got away with reading everything they were given and reproducing it verbatim; now, the fittest are determined by the most finely tuned information filters. The liberal arts are based on a small number of universally applicable texts and arguments — they usually comprise your reading for Week 1 — so familiarize yourself and stop wasting time with contemporary paraphrase.

2. Study sober, relax on Adderall. As students become aware of how easy it is to feign ADD, the presence of Adderall on campus grows. Admittedly, the effects are impressive, but also easy to replicate with eight hours of sleep, a power nap or meditation. To the best of my knowledge, none of the three suffer from diminishing returns to scale. If you really love that sweet dextroamphetamine, or are a dope fiend looking to trade your liver for your nasal septum, use it recreationally — ladies love a good listener.

3. You don’t want to be a lawyer or a doctor. The biographies of educated people from before the 20th century show a remarkable lack of diversity in the studies they pursued — religion, law, occasionally engineering. During first-year orientation, one might think he was transported back in time, but this is the result of limited imagination, not limited choice. I’m not saying you should go wild and major in Environmental/Watered-Down Studies, but try a subject you don’t have to pretend to find interesting. At the least, it would spare everyone the nuisance of overhearing you brag about how rigorously you challenge yourself, shabbily disguised as complaining. When I am financially prepared to endow Middlebury with significant amounts of money, rest assured I will lobby for the Dinner Conversation major (in the meantime, the ES department will return to its home pasture, ninth grade General Science).

4. You decided to BS that one, eh? In his deconstructive essay “On Bull----,” Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt claims that the stuff is a “greater enemy of the truth than lies are,” because unlike the liar, whose gained advantage is contingent on concealing the truth, which leaves it essentially unaltered, the bull-----er has no regard for the truth at all. In short, Frankfurt describes the underlying principle of a liberal arts education — prioritizing the approach to content over content itself. So when you claim that this was your strategy in completing a given assignment, it doesn’t really distinguish the quality of your effort from any other instance. In other words, you’re doing the best you can — and sometimes that amounts to mere BS.

Good luck with exams, enjoy the holidays and you’ll hear more from me in January.