Trying On: The American Education

This blog will resume where I last left off making public reflection on education–the juncture at which I had my mother turn our vehicle around somewhere on the West Virginia-Ohio boarder, and to book it towards Ann Arbor, Michigan. At the University of Michigan, I learned much about the structure of the academy. I learned what the “continental/analytic divide” is, or may have been. I learned to laugh at it. I temporarily learned, and forgot, symbolic logic. I came to understand the nature of comparative literature departments as convenient catch-all vats for the vague sort of cultural theorizing that is not allowed to legitimately go on elsewhere. I studied some German, I studied some Greek, and my body sat in a classroom under the auspice of learning Latin. I lived in –and was tried by– a self-governing, democratic scholarship house established by a Jeffersonian electric energy mogul who also happened to be a pederast. I tutored writing students who struggled to read. I taught a class on fictional identities and the post-modern age (ho-hum!) to a group of precocious fifteen-year-olds who will be far more successful than I. I wrote earnest poetry, I wrote gimmicky poetry. My efforts were received, my bluffs were called. I took out loans to go and sit by a freezing lake in Maine and read Thoreau for a while, and I sat, and I must say that I am still not all that moved by the sunrise. I had a few incredible professors: a political scientist, a vagabond poet, a professor of rhetoric and composition studies, and a disaffected German intellectual historian. I maintain a few close friendships: an equally disaffected would-be theologian and grandchild of a Messianic Jewish church-builder, a fanciful sort of filmmaker, a twelve-year old homeschooler and fantasy writer from one of my workshops, and a philosopher who has gone on to work in labor law. And now, two years later, I am leaving.

In a few short weeks, I will be leaving Ohio for Swarthmore, Philadelphia, with significantly less money in the bank and a loosely strung-together knapsack of questions: is a liberal arts education really any different from the education provided by a large university? Is a liberal arts education worth it? Is “moral education,” “education of the whole person,” or a community-based type of personal challenge and affirmation provided at a place like Swarthmore? Much is at stake: I left behind good, but unhappy, prospects of a mostly-funded education at Michigan. Moreover, I choose Swarthmore over Other University, a much larger place, but a place much more internationally established in Comparative Literature, and home to one of my former patron’s (the electric mogul) other house projects. I hope to maintain this blog in order, in public eyes, or in my own retrospective ones, to detect a trajectory undergirding my answers. I will not be able to answer conclusively for the case of liberal arts education, as my more elated moods would have me want you to believe–a “place like Swarthmore” is no place. But, Swarthmore, as soon as I arrive, will definitely be Someplace. 

My fears:

1. That the courses will be over-general.
2. That the great burden of Other University’s miraculous and wonderful course offerings (cf. “Reading the Ancients Through Derrida,” “Spinoza and the New Spinozists,” “Theorizing the Animal”) will continue to haunt me as I enroll in such blandly-titled staples as “Seminar in American Literature” or “Seminar in 19th Century Philosophy.”
3. That the place will be cozy.
4. That the place will cultivate in me, or will have already cultivated in its students, an easy-money bourgeois sort of pettiness, ease of living, and general unawareness of the goings-on of the rest of the world (Caledonia; Detroit).
5. That the community of writers will be static or incestuous.
6. That my Particular Living Situation will lead me to feeling alienated from campus life.
7. That I will feel the tension of the significant limitation of my freedom that is a 20-credit meal plan and a tiny campus in the middle of suburban WASPia. 
8. That many of the professors who I am most excited to work with will be on leave. For the rest of my duration at Swarthmore.