Life in college can certainly be tedious. The average student is perpetually balancing the demands of papers, exams, minor assignments and standardized tests. That stress is a constant baseline of the college experience is beyond question. However, far too many students have forgotten that college is more than the turmoil of grades and coursework. It is, rather, a time of intellectual repose – a chance to reflect, to study and to learn; a unique opportunity to lay the foundation that can serve an individual for the rest of his life. Students at Georgetown often fail to seize this once-in-a-lifetime prospect – with disastrous results. By focusing on the minutia of GPAs and standardized test scores, we sacrifice that which is only possible in college and that which we will scarcely find after we leave – an intellectual forum for conversation and an academic environment bounded only by the reach of our imagination and the breadth of academic inquisitiveness.
In many cases, a focus on a professional future has replaced intellectualism. The pull of the LSATs, the GMATs, the MCATs or the GREs, as well as the gravity of résumé construction and interview preparation, can overpower the allure of academic exploration and intellectual development. The number of students attending standardized test classes and professional panels at the Career Education Center often exceeds the number of students attending academic forums and discussions. When taking classes, we as students have learned how to calculate precisely the amount of time we need to devote to a particular class in order to receive the desired grade. Rare it is that we really immerse ourselves in a class, approaching its syllabus and lessons for the sake of knowledge alone. For many, reviews on RateMyProfessors.com now precede academic interest as a factor influencing pre-registration decisions. Rather than absorbing the diversity of courses offered across the many departments of our institution, we tend to concern ourselves with what will fit into a tightly defined major, which we often believe defines us as students.
This is an understandable trend. A GPA and an LSAT score determine the future path of a law school applicant, while the tedious task of intellectual development may not register at all before an admissions committee. The sacrifices that accompany that mindset, however, are too great. What we gain in increasing our testing percentile or gathering transcript accolades, we lose in taking advantage of the opportunity to learn and to develop. What we may gain as atomized individuals in the professional rat race, we lose as a campus community in engaging and challenging one another to reach higher into the stratosphere of academic discovery. To the extent that we specialize in majors and narrow our academic focus, we guarantee a vapid and limited education that suffers from its particularity.
Similarly, for those students who find time for extracurricular activity, action, rather than thought, has become the keystone for effort. Just as career preparation has come to replace intellectualism, activism has come to replace academic dialogue. Seemingly every day there is a vigil or a protest or a rally; much less frequently is there a heavily attended debate or a conversation or a forum. Whereas a university is supposed to act as a center of debate on ideas and ideals, Georgetown has become a hotbed of advocacy and protest. Students earnestly and doggedly protest university policy regarding LGBTQ students or alcohol policy, but rarely is there a conversation on the intellectual, philosophical or religious traditions that still undergird the tensions at play in this campus advocacy. More concerned with the excitement of action and the adrenaline of public remonstrance, student advocates can neglect the one chance we have here in college to move beyond the posters and specious slogans and into substantive, meaningful conversations.
We must recapture and reconstruct the academic ethos of our university. Rather than focusing on professional pursuits, we must re-inculcate an appreciation for the value of knowledge and learning for its own sake. Rather than focusing exclusively on activism, we must embrace once again campus conversation that fosters thought rather than noise. And there is little time to spare. We will enter a world in which a true intellectual conversation is much more difficult when we leave Georgetown. In the mean time, we must not allow the essence of the college experience – academic exploration – to leave Georgetown, or to leave us.
Jeffrey Long is a junior in the College. He can be reached at longthehoya.com. Conscience of a Conservative appears every other Tuesday.
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