Much has been made, this year, of the apparent1 mental health crisis
at Columbia. It’s true the school is a great deal more stressful than is
typically recognized (certain questionable
surveys
notwithstanding)—six-course semesters, regarded as an unreasonable workload at
most schools, are standard fare for our engineers; the reading lists for LitHum
and CC are (I’m told) also exceptionally long.
And it’s true that unlike MIT (which, pace Beast, appears to be the most stressful academic environment in the country) Columbia has historically provided little assurance to students that their feelings of psychological exhaustion are normal, and that it’s acceptable to relax once in a while. We’re left to discover this on our own, and some people never do.
But—and this is where I take issue—it’s widely claimed that the stress issue has its root in a broader lack of “community” on the campus. (A certain editor of the Spectator, famously insistent that “Columbia community” was a contradiction in terms, forbade the two words from appearing next to each other in print.) Columbia, the common wisdom goes, is a graduate school funded by undergraduates; it ensures only that its undergraduates are happy enough that they do not become sick or dead and stop paying tuition. If we had only gone to Princeton we would have had eating clubs to make us feel special; if we had only gone to Yale we would have spent all our days wrapped in the warm embrace of a residential college, happy and loved and well….
This is a caricature of collegiate social institutions, and its conclusion is wrong. The problem of stress, at least, rather comes from the community—from the endless discussion of thesis word counts and club commitments, and from the ritual exam-time greeting that goes “Oh, you only have k midterms? I have k+2.” More generally, I am unconvinced that forced bonding activity is a remedy for alienation: it is hardly the case that there are no opportunities to form relationships here (witness the number of people whose social circles groups are formed on COÖP or during orientation week alone), and if I am only capable of maintaining friendships with ten people it does little good to place me in a room with a hundred more.
Why, then, demand a house system (or a mandatory meal plan, or any other kind of synthetic community)? So we can play juvenile pranks with furniture from distant buildings? So that we can throw large parties with university funds, at which we will stand in a corner and talk with four people? This obsessive turning-inward of the campus attention seems like a profoundly dangerous thing—a giving-in to the fantasy that all the best things in the world are found within the ivory tower, and that we owe the development of our character and our reputation exclusively to our alma mater. A university, and an elite university in particular, has a responsibility to direct its focus outwards. Columbia, I think, succeeds in this; whether it does so as a result of neglect rather than deliberate choice is unimportant.
The omphaloskeptical mindset is good for at least one thing: attracting donations from alumni. A pattern among Bwog commenters, after expressing disgust at their treatment by Columbia, is to announce that Columbia doesn’t deserve a cent of donation money from alumni. This, too, is wrong (though it’s a more complicated question whether any donation to a university is ethical). It seems that one ought to give precisely in order to prevent Columbia from becoming the sort of place that has to convince students that it is the entire world in order to keep the doors open.
Update: Lucy makes a smarter (and certainly more important) point than the one I was originally intending to make: that the university’s cultivation (or non-cultivation) of a “campus community” does not change the fact that we have an individual obligation to look out for the people around us.
Regardless of where it comes from or whether it is endemic to Columbia, the psychological environment is very real.
On a second reading, this “apparent” strikes me as deeply insensitive. ↩