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Prisoners of Princeton

In “The Shawshank Redemption,” Morgan Freeman talks about the effects of long-term incarceration on prison inmates: “These walls are funny. First you hate ’em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.”

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The quote could not have been more apt if it had been expressly written about my Princeton experience: just replace the “funny walls” with the FitzRandolph Gate. I loathed those gates and everything they stood for during the first half of freshman year, deliberately walking through them two or three times in symbolic defiance against the culture, expectations and traditions that had begun to weave a sticky orange web around me. It’s hard for senior me to understand just how much freshman me hated the University, but I will always regard the social atmosphere of that year as my own personal version of Sartrean hell.

At some point in the middle of my first year, I was “used to” Princeton to the extent that I stopped mentioning transfer applications every time I called home. By May, I reluctantly admitted to myself that I was growing fond of this place. I wrote a column in which I compared the University to a cult and proudly announced that I did not intend to join. I would remain gracefully and gratefully on the sidelines, appreciating all the University offered without doing the weird chest salute gesture at the end of our Old Nassau theme song. An anonymous upperclassman left me an ominous message in the comments section: “Just you wait, freshman.”

The Morgan Freeman quote came up recently when I was explaining to a friend why I couldn’t wait to leave Princeton. I genuinely love the University and everything it has given me: friends, ideas, trips to exotic locales and free laundry. But I am ready to leave. I have been ready to leave for weeks.

I am ready to leave because of all the ways in which the University is like a prison. A magnificent, gilded prison that swallows you alive as a freshman and spits you out again after serving a four-year sentence. You will walk out of the gates with the University’s particular brand of fleur-de-lis etched so deeply into your psyche that you will carry this awareness of yourself as a Princetonian around like an ethnic identity for the rest of your life. You even have several orange uniforms pieced together from countless free clothing giveaways to point to as relics of your incarceration.

The University is a place where students can successfully convince themselves that they are having the best four years of their life while they pull all-nighters on essays, scramble to flesh out their summers with résumé-worthy experiences and cancel friend date after friend date because a social life is the one aspect of Princeton that is easily rescheduled. The academic demands are unrealistic (how much of the required reading did you actually complete this semester?) and the extracurriculars are often more stressful than the coursework. There will inevitably be multiple emotional breakdowns along the way but, if the mental pressure gets too high, you had best hide all that anxiety — the University doesn’t tolerate severe depression.

And yet, like Shawshank, at the end of this harrowing, hammering experience, many of the inmates desire nothing more than to cower within these Gothic buildings for another four years, protected by the womb-like amenities and familiar though often brutally demanding campus culture from the uncertainty of everything beyond the gates.

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I wish I had the email address of the upperclassman who commented on my freshman year farewell column. I wish I could tell her that I still don’t do the Old Nassau salute, but that she may have been right about everything else.

Because, like I said above, I am in love with Princeton. I love the challenging grind of an impossible amount of coursework, the sharpness of my friendships, the breathless race to keep abreast of too many extracurricular commitments. And most of all, I love the person I have turned into (or was it Princeton doing the turning?) over the past four years. At Princeton, I know who I am. Outside, I have to remake myself. And that is terrifying.

I want to leave the University the way most Shawshank prisoners want to leave prison: The desire is strictly theoretical. I’m not sure how institutionalized I have become, but I am about to find out. And to all the underclassmen reading this, especially those who cannot wait to walk out the FitzRandolph Gate and free themselves in every way from the powerful, complicated, wonderful and arduous burden that is the University, I say: Just you wait.

Tehila Wenger is a politics major from Columbus, Ohio. She can be reached at twenger@princeton.edu.

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