I just found the following amazing quote in an article by Chris Hedges that a reader of this blog sent to me:
We must strengthen our attraction for those singular students whose greatest pleasures may come not from the camaraderie of classmates but from the lonely acts of writing poetry or mastering the cello or solving mathematical riddles or translating Catullus. We must make Dartmouth a hospitable environment for students who march “to a different drummer”—for those creative loners and daring dreamers whose commitment to the intellectual and artistic life is so compelling that they appreciate, as Prospero reminded Shakespeare’s audiences, that for certain persons a library is “dukedom large enough.”
This was said by James O. Freedman, who was, for a while, the President of Dartmouth. The creative loner he describes was the kind of student I was. I avoided sororities and student clubs like the plague because most of them seemed like a complete waste of time. My way of being makes it incomprehensible to me why people would be so desperate to belong to a group that they would consent to undergo some kind of insane hazing ritual and try to prove their worth to people they have no reason to respect. I’m also not American, so I have no idea why universities need to maintain hugely expensive sports teams and award college diplomas to failing students just because they can throw a ball.
Sometimes, it seems like people find it so hard to find any value to education and the pursuit of knowledge that they need to infest college campuses with sporting events and sociability opportunities in order to make going to college worthwhile.
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