Since it's summer (for one more month, at least) and I've driven home to watch reruns of the Simpsons and work a little, I've noticed how much more intelligent I am at home. Now that last statement may sound arrogant, but it's true -- I've suddenly become an intellectual, something of the person I was in high school. I've suddenly started reading books at a faster pace than at any time since the second grade -- only then I was reading books called "Freddy's Adventures to the Mushroom Planet" (And that writer was on what?).
And I noticed these changes almost immediately. For some reason I can sit down at my computer for three hours and read old issues of "The Economist" cover to cover. I have time to think about my life. This focus is more productive than my classes at Dartmouth. My general summer boredom actually causes me to educate myself more than the best professor. Of course not everyone may be this way, but I think my situation stems from the fact that I am not at Dartmouth right now and that I have come home to find out that home is not quite how I remembered it.
I don't write this to disparage my education, because I do actually learn a lot in class. I just happen to be learning a lot about myself this summer. Going home is now like going to the gas station; it's a place to refuel my motivation, to sort out what I want to do with myself. Along the same vein, the home now is no more than a pump to fill me up for the outside world -- in the same way that Dartmouth is supposed to be a pump to prepare my mind.
When I came home this summer, I realized that my bonds with family and friends had changed slightly. Going to college divides you and your family and high school friends. Your parents have gone through nine months of sorting out their relationship while you have not been in the equation and you have gone through your own metamorphosis at school. And even if you feel alienated from your family, your old support group -- high school friends -- will not be quite as helpful as before. Some of your friends will always be there, but others have either gotten internships in far-off lands or just drifted away of their own accord.
Now that I have given everyone the impression that I sit at home and read because I have no friends and hate my parents, I will reaffirm your belief that I am the most popular kid out there and that I deeply love my parents (and that last part I am not being sarcastic about). The reason that everything has changed can all be pinned on one thing: Dartmouth. After the initial transition of paying lip service to 100 people during freshman fall, calling them your friends, you gradually winnow down your circle to something reasonably sized. Here's that support group, just reformed. These are the people who will distract you and startle you out of doing your work, dumb you down and drain your intellectual powers.
Sounds like not that much fun? You, the reader going into college, probably think that you are smarter than I and that this will not happen to you. But it will. And I actually think this change is good. Rather than breeding a rare brand of loner intellectualism, as Dartmouth appears to be trying to do, this type of "dumbness" exists within a group and should be something to encourage at Dartmouth. It exists because of the simple reason that everyone around you is also rather smart, making you feel more average in comparison (unless you are cocky and/or are me). Paradox!
By dumbness, I mean that your friends are always going to act stupidly and "unintellectual" at times. As long as there is no aversion to actual intellectualism, I consider this dumbness a trait that should exist latent in a person. Intellectualism is usually better fostered in forums for thinking than among friends, just as it is rare to discuss the Stanislavsky method outside an acting circle or the use of internal monologue in "Strange Interlude." The reason that intellectualism is so hard to breed is that it requires academic expertise in narrow areas. Obviously, I would be turned off by a friend who feels pressure to act "normally" and avoids academic discussion. Therefore I think that it is better for Dartmouth to build and strengthen the forums for intellectual activity, rather than change the people within the College. Remember, a democracy cannot function without the proper civil institutions and economic base. Nor can intellectualism survive without analogous outlets. But I have strayed a bit into campus politics.
So this is the intellectual and social bubble at Dartmouth. We have perhaps the most insular bubble in the country, because we go to school in such an isolated little place as Hanover. Thus, campus politics take precedent over national politics, which get shoved in as AP articles in The Dartmouth, unless it happens to concern the Dartmouth campus. The people around us take on the greatest importance in our lives, more so than at other institutions (most notably a certain one in Cambridge, near my house). Gradually our new friends get closer and we gain a few other friends, just as we lose our high school friends and become more adult towards our parents. Dartmouth has started to actually make me mature, and that is not an easy feat.
So as I sit here at home feeling intellectual, witty, and urbane, I realize that the reason I don't have the same leanings in school is because I am so busy. I don't have the three hours every night to read "The Economist," or Proust (yes, I am trying to read Proust). I don't have stifling academic pressure to excel at home. I still maintain that latent intellectualism occasionally manifests itself. The question I pose is that the fostering of a loner intellectualism may make us a more arrogant, elitist institution, which will, in turn, hurt relations with residents of Hanover, due to the anti-intellectual strain that runs through the America. Possibly the image of the frat boy might be a little more blurry in the world of academia, and possibly we might climb a spot or two in US News and World Report, but the average student will be less well-rounded, less active. I would prefer that we find a compromise other than the one proposed by the administration. So as I change to what I hope is for the better, I would like to see Dartmouth do the same. And, yes, I translated Catullus in high school.
