Swarthmore, Brown, Pomona, or Amherst?

dchow08
Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:05:37 +0000

treesnogger, how were you so fortunate as to have dinner with Michael Dukakis!? I certainly saw him speak but I didn’t know that he was dining with people. What restaurant was it?

A few additional comments I would like to make:

about academics: People in general do take their work very seriously, because they want to learn and because they understand that this is college and they want to make the most of their time here. It’s not like they don’t have fun, though.

This is a rather personal comment, but I really like the fact that I’m going to a small school. Some of my high school friends at Columbia and Georgetown were shocked when I told them that Swarthmore is smaller than our high school. Instead of 5,000 people it was 1500. But I’m glad that I’ll be friends with people I’ll know very well, and that there is a sense of community here. It’s also nice to know that you do get a lot of personal attention from professors here–to me, that’s a very important part of college. Also, the fact that there are so many resources to help you is good because it means that I –

Okay, I have to backtrack a little.
First, to all people looking at colleges, think a little about what you want to get out of it. In high school, as now, my primary goal was to be well-educated (of course this went with being wiser, being more useful to society, being Western-educated). It’s really hard to be well-educated–knowing and understanding the great books of the Western world, knowing all about history and science and art and music. I’m tempted to say that by these standards, it is impossible to become well-educated in only four school years (ideally, becoming well-educated starts at a young age though). I’m starting to think that intellectualism is really a mindset, not necessarily a set of knowledge. I think you know where I am heading–in learning, contact with the experts is important, for rather obvious reasons.

Can you be educated if you go to McCabe Library and read all the books? I think so–certainly in America those who desired to learn read for themselves–they weren’t forced to read Plato or Marx; they chose to. William Dean Howells said in his autobiography that in his neighborhood in Ohio, farmers and tradesmen who had never been to high school or college bought books when they came in with the river steamer. They didn’t just buy books–they sought them hungrily; they sought to learn. Close contact with the expert, though, is so much more meaningful–you get much more out of it. Lectures are often dramatic paraphrases of previously written works–they can certainly be great, but being able to talk to students and professors in small classes–I think of my math class, which has 11 students–mean that I have more control in my learning.

It also helps, to those who are searching for an intellectual college, to ask what intellectual even means. It doesn’t mean constantly philosophizing about Plato and Kierkegaard and constructing esoteric philosophies for the chosen few, nor does it mean talking about academics all the time. Jacques Barzun calls it “the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence.” You can read more about that later.

It is comforting to know that here, at least, there are people who care that students learn. Actually, I think that is the greatest comfort to being here, with the exception of course that you are safe here.

Really, the complaints about dorm and food are rather hollow.