STUDENTS at the University today were accepted due to strong academic and extracurricular credentials from high school. Generally, the high school success of students at the University was achieved by working hard. At the University, it has been my observation that students seem to indulge the same ambition that carried them here in the first place. While this is not surprising, it can have interesting and ironic consequences at a school that styles itself as the keeper of Jefferson’s legacy, of which the emphasis on public life and public duty play such a prominent part.
The indulgence of personal ambition, whether related to one’s career or one’s social life, is an important part of life, and it can be good and bad. On the one hand, this ambition leads to a University that has a proliferation of clubs and activities, but on the other, it can cause students to lose perspective on what is truly important. Between going to club sports practice, classes, the library, service activities, Greek meetings, and so forth, it is possible to burnish a résumé while letting our responsibilities as citizens languish.
As a graduate student, there exist substantial distance between my life and that of the undergraduates, but there are two areas where I have interacted a good deal with undergraduates that have shaped my thinking here. First, I was a TA for a year in two upper-level courses in economics, the Economics of Education and Law and Economics, both of which relate significantly to important issues in public life. But it was the form and the formalities of the courses — the grades, the due dates, the exams — which concerned my students, not the course content. Although I was a green TA, and therefore much of the blame for the torpor that sometimes infected my section can no doubt be laid at my feet, it was often clear that my students had hardly done the reading assignments and were not ready to think or speak about the issues presented and discussed in class in any depth. This sentiment on the part of teachers is not new or original, and I feel like a schoolmarm to point it out, but it is based in fact.
Second, I have faced similar frustrations working to register voters at the University and around Charlottesville, a process which takes an enormous amount of volunteer effort. It is often difficult to get students involved in the political process. While many have participated, I have more often encountered the refrain, even from students who are strongly supporting a particular candidate, that schoolwork or other extra-curricular activities simply preclude the possibility of being an active participant beyond the fundamental act of voting in this election cycle.
Charlottesville is an unusual college town in that the city’s non-student population is far more politically engaged than the college itself. The weekend before the Democratic primary, for example, I witnessed hundreds of non-student Charlottesville residents canvass for their preferred candidates, while the number of students doing so was a couple of dozen.
The disengagement from the process is troubling not only because it prevents us from playing, as young people, the role that we could in this election and in the political life of the city, state and country, but because it demonstrates a myopic perspective. As I see it, the issues at stake in this year’s choice of political leadership are, to slightly change the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” grave and getting graver. Those issues are our responsibility to understand, and to participate actively in determining how they will be dealt with. Quotidian concerns of our busy lives can hardly be put aside, but reasonable compromises with various activities, such as being prepared to sacrifice partying for a few weekends, create the possibility of making important contributions.
I think this is an important realization. In a world that rewards and expects college students to achieve certain things — decent grades, involvement in extracurricular activities — those things can’t be put aside without an unusually and perhaps unnecessarily non-self-interested outlook. There is nothing wrong with that. But sometimes, especially times like these, we need to find ways to make moderate sacrifices to be a part of creating something more permanent and far-reaching than marginal increases in our future paychecks.
Andrew Winerman’s column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.winerman@cavalierdaily.com.
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