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Wednesday, July 21, 2004
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COSSETTED
Many little girls on Rehoboth Beach have had their entire torsos encased in thick flotation jackets by anxious parents. UD watches these little girls stagger about on the sand and she thinks of Houdini. She thinks of FBI men in bullet-proof vests. She thinks of Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit. These girls will be cossetted by their parents for years. When they are allowed to go off to college, their college will hand them an iPod to go with their cell phone and palm pilot and laptop. And UD, their professor, will watch them straggle into her classroom dragging all of these wires and bells and screens, and lo, she will weep for them. She will weep for them as they sit restlessly for a few minutes while UD lectures, and then, prompted by a command from one of their devices, suddenly leave the room. When they come back in, they've lost the thread of the lecture or the discussion. They've never been able to concentrate on any one thing. There's so much going on. Anyway, the world - a raging ocean footsteps away - is too terrifying to think clearly about for long. Lose yourself in the music. UD admires Timothy Burke's ideas about college reform. Three elements of the contemporary college or university - an incoherent curriculum, over-specialized faculty, and nanny state conditions on campus - are killing it, Burke rightly notes. "This blueprint counsels abandoning the vast majority of services provided by most colleges and universities while also maintaining a scrupulous disinterest in the private lives of students, faculty and administrators," he writes. But by the time Duke University ("No doubt people are going to use it mostly for personal use," says one incoming student of the iPods. "But if Duke wants to spend that much money on me, I got no problem with it." "It's the ultimate relaxation," says another, non-Duke enthusiast. , one of many devotees who, Newsweek reports, are "obsessive" about the device) gets the strait-jacketed girls of Rehoboth Beach, it is arguably too late. Burke's college would offer "no extensive counseling to students, or support for student groups... The college would take no official or administrative interest in the private lives of its students." Burke's college would be an icon of autonomous thought, a community organized around intellectuality, not somas. Yet the products of hypersensitive parents cannot be expected to understand the principles of independence and realism upon which the true university is based. It is a kind of bait and switch to raise affluent American children on fear, dependency, and entitlement, and then suddenly, at the college gates, confront them with starkly opposing values. Why, more and more people ask, are American parents willing to pay obscene fees for their childrens' college? Because they know that no price for long-distance cossetting is too high. There are never enough layers of insulation. |