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.
Clarissa's Blog 
// try to prove their worth to people they have no reason to respect
RE sororities – isn’t it f.e. like belonging to a prestigious gentlemen’s club in Sherlock Holmes’s era? So, it’s proving your worth to join an institution, like a youth movement, with its’ history, not to particular person X you may dislike personally.
//why universities need to maintain hugely expensive sports teams
I am sure universities think it pays to do that. For reasons I haven’t searched of, but you can, if you’re interested in the topic.
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“I am sure universities think it pays to do that”
– These calculations have been done a multitude of times. The consensus is always that these sports teams never pay for themselves, let alone bring any profits. 😦 I was on a campus visit to a struggling public university that spent millions of dollars on building this huge sports arena that they didn’t even have enough people to fill. I did not accept the position they offered me.
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I think a very few sports programs pay for themselves and make a profit. Penn State under Paterno did, for decades. But the vast majority do not.
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“Penn State under Paterno did, for decades”
– And we all know what a disaster that sports program was. 😦
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Indeed.
BTW, I am glad you were as interested in this essay by Chris Hedges as I am!
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Thank you for sending it to me! I wouldn’t have found it on my own.
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Exactly. And to my surprise, a beneficiary of that program, the current President of the MLA, Michael Berube, came over to my blog a while ago and chastised me for being critical of the Penn State sports program. He is the Paterno Family Professor of Literature at PSU. This shocks me, for a lot of reasons. I always admired him and followed his now defunct blog for quite a while. He was taking on some enemies of the liberal arts,etc. Could he have been so naive? I don’t know.
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Unfortunately, I’ve been having my suspicions about Berube for a while. 😦
Feel free to leave links to your posts on the subject. I don’t feel ready to address it as intelligently as many people do. But I do want to learn more.
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Hattie, I’m so surprised to hear you say this. As your own link to that Nov 2011 exchange on your blog shows (below), I didn’t chastise you for anything. Nor, for that matter, have I ever “catered” to any “big boys.” I’m very sad to see you mischaracterize my exchange with you in this way.
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I hope this is not the real Michael Bérubé because both the comment and the way it was made are quite strange.
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No, that’s him, for sure. What do you find strange about his reply?
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I feel weird talking about somebody in the third person when I’m not sure if they are around or not. In any case, I find it hard to believe that the real Berube would have nothing better to do with his time than to Google himself and go to every website where his name is mentioned. Even I don’t do that, and I’m far less busy. I don’t visit any blogs where I’m discussed, let alone leave comments because it would consume my life.
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The problem is that no one can get as far as Berube has without catering to the big boys. I have never figured him to be a person with evil intent. He may just be a typical American naif.
I’ll look up links, but remember, this could be a hot topic for you. I’ve got no dogs in this fight: I’m not an academic.
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“The problem is that no one can get as far as Berube has without catering to the big boys”
– Sad but true.
“but remember, this could be a hot topic for you”
– I know. I remember I wrote about the idiocy of fraternities and sororities, and people exploded with rage.
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But when you start naming names, things can boil over. The whole system has been in place for generations, and men are committed to it.
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Just one link, fairly innocuous.
http://hattie.typepad.com/hatties_web/2011/11/berube-paterno-professor-at-penn-state-chimes-in-on-scandal-he-is-someone-i-have-long-admired-as-a-professor-and-as-a-pers.html
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“It is absolutely all about men — and Sandusky clearly sensed the extent to which youth sports are all about young men trying to please older men.”
– I’m so far removed from this entire phenomenon that I never thought of it this way. Now many things are becoming clear.
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But the library is never large enough! There’s always stuff they don’t have! That’s why the worst thing a college can do is cut library funding.
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I’ve long thought that football should be completely disconnected from college, and minor league football should take the place of college football. It works great for hockey and baseball.
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I agree completely!!
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This, basically. I was never a joiner. I did do things when I was a kid like join the Brownies and the Girl Scouts, but by the time I was in high school I had decided most of these things were a waste of time. The idea of never being without a crowd of people around me… well that’s my idea of hell. As for getting involved in some humiliating and/or dangerous ritual just to belong to a group… that never even entered my radar. I guess I was lucky. I also didn’t go to college the standard way (go away from home for first time, live in a dorm, go the full four years in one go, etc.) so I didn’t even think about getting into “college life.” The only thing that appealed to me about college was the idea of learning more things and getting a degree, and that soon palled.
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“The idea of never being without a crowd of people around me… well that’s my idea of hell. As for getting involved in some humiliating and/or dangerous ritual just to belong to a group… that never even entered my radar.”
– I know! It’s a mystery to me why people do all those things. My own students shared pretty humiliating and painful hazing rituals they underwent. I asked them what made it worth it but the only response I ever got was “Everybody is doing it. . .”
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I also have a friend who was bullied so much by her sorority that she had a nervous breakdown. Some really vicious stuff.
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There are no sororities in Australia. You can join university clubs, but these are quite boring. Universities aren’t really social clubs, here.
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