Campus Life

I think in the end, I like working in a University. Beyond my obvious need to remain in the academic environment I was not able to actually enter as a graduate student as was The Plan, I have a genuine affinity for the place. There are things that I like about it more and more with time, and I'm not just saying this to make the possibility of staying here until retirement so my child can attend college for free more palatable to me. For instance I like to work in education but I don't like to teach, so higher education administration suits me. It has a pedagogical component that does not involve the actual classroom--my work is more rooted in the places where the classroom melds with the rest of the students' lives here (this melding often being a place of chaos, for better or worse, and a place I remember well). It is, I think, inspiring sometimes, to get to observe the coming of age of young people. Personally it provides a depth of perception about my own (still on-going) coming of age. Beyond that, it's as good a mission as any other that one could be a part of. Young people are very peculiar and it amazes me every day, in a good way, that I was once that peculiar.

For instance, they really argue about shit with anybody who will argue back. They sit at tables mid-campus and engage white haired right wing professors about "Palestine". They hand out Conservative Union flyers about a talk entitled The Minutemen: Racists or Patriots? They write for and deligently distribute a newsletter based on "the writings and philosophy" of Ayn Rand. As second year students--that's like what? 19 years old--they use words like hegemony and heterosexist paradigm in their campus paper columns. They completely have the strength of their convictions, even if the conviction is that they should be able to switch their entire schedule of classes late in the term because they've discovered that they "absolutely have to take History of Fashion" (true statement, true course--I didn't make that up). They are more alike that they would think or admit--whether they think it's their daddy's bick bucks or their position of relative socio-economic and racial underpriviledge vis a vis students from the upper class that is at the root of it, they all think the universe revolves around them. They also all have no idea how fast time flies or how young they really are or how many more time they will be able to really fuck up in life before it catches up to them.

I mean no condescension whatsover--this is all genuine appreciation. I am sure it relates to my sense of loss for not having been able to fully bask in the light of all I describe above. It also probably relates to how much of what I describe above is still very much me, as 30, in fact, is not exactly old. Things were never simple when I was younger, so it's not nostalgia: I am well aware that 18-22 can be fucking tough fucking years. It's just you know, when you work and to an extend live among them, you get a sense that the concept of "future" is real, insofar as people are in the world today, with you, whose perspective is completely different, whose possibilities (whether they know it or not) are completely different, whose "world history parameters" are completely different. We have a big dissident from the communist block coming to visit our campus and most students have no clue, not only about who he is, but about that whole history. They are post 9/11, they use terms like terrorism without quotations marks around it (for the most part) , they were born in the late 80's--you know that's post "Thriller" and "E.T." Beirut meant nothing to them until this past September.

Part of the pace of things that their "existence" (and its various expressions, like say, the carrying around of not one, not two but three electronic communication devices at a time) suggests can be daunting or depressing--it can appear to be a "lack" of proper context and to the extent that a lot of Americans irrespective of age are sheltered and uninformed about world affairs, some of that is problematic. But some of it is not; it just points us in the direction of something very real, which is the limits of a life. The primacy of the current reality of a life. The importance of stopping long enough to recognize a certain peculiarity to oneself, one's moment in time, one's being 18 in New York in 2006--which is unlike one's being anyone else anywhere else. I find that inspiring and liberating and I only regret that most of them don't have the time to note it.