The struggle for relevancy

Students for a Democratic Society, a 1960's activist group, told young Americans to "make the personal political" in an effort to make politics more relevant. There is much SDS could teach Princeton precepts, which often fail to "make the academic relevant."

"Relevancy" is a dangerous term, especially in light of the recent article about Princeton in The Atlantic Monthly. I don't mean precepts must necessarily prepare students for jobs or later life — what David Brooks in his article called the "prudential" approach to education. But the "poetic" approach to education — learning for learning's sake — which Brooks praised in his article, often dissatisfies as well. An entirely poetic approach constricts as much as an entirely prudential approach. It is too easy to become trapped in the text. And when the precept springs off the text into a discussion on a current event, the preceptor is sometimes too ready to cry "off-topic" and navigate the discussion back from its excursion into relevancy.

Of course a precept must address the central texts of a course. But often these works seem antiquated, making it difficult to appreciate the importance of the work. It is the responsibility of precepts to prevent the syllabus from seeming irrelevant, and sometimes the best way to do this is to discuss current cultural or political manifestations of the studied themes: historical, political and cultural themes do not so easily become obsolete as form and style become outdated.

Relevancy is person-dependent: something is only relevant if someone sees it as relevant. And The Atlantic's separation of Princeton students into poetic and prudential camps is worrisome since each camp discourages engaging the world. Learning for personal satisfaction does not recognize the importance of learning as preparation to engage the world. Nor does learning as a form of job training recognize the importance of learning in order to participate more intelligently as a citizen. Of course, there are also students who combine both the poetic and the prudential and students who ignore both, all at the expense of engaging the world actively.

But there are too few outlets at Princeton for structured discussion of current issues — and precepts should step in to fill that role. We should allow more "off-topic" discussion when those discussions address the essence of the topic and make it relevant, immediate and urgent to students. Encouraging these discussions will help suck some of the air out of the much-bemoaned "Princeton bubble." One purpose of a Princeton education is to help us understand our world — and we need to know that there is a connection between a historical example and its influence on our world.

I heard a postgraduate student in precept last week say that our generation will never have as exciting a time as our parents' generation. That sort of thing really gets to me. In many ways — though in ways that are less personal — our times are more exciting than those of our parents: Our generation faces issues of global poverty and disease that were not addressed in our parents' time; campus demonstrations target global injustice as well as injustice within the United States; information technologies are changing every aspect of everyday life; America's allies and adversaries are less clearly defined than they were for our parents. The rules of the Cold War era are obsolete, and the rules of the 21st century have yet to be written — indeed we'll be the authors when they are. Now, tell me that's not exciting.

These issues are as exciting as the Civil Rights Movement or Vietnam — but they are much less personal. The lives of our generation are not threatened by an unjust society; the lives of our generation are not threatened by an unjust war. Civil rights and Vietnam were personal because they affected everyone — everyone knew them and everyone could feel them.

In our impersonal world, chain stores dominate the commercial landscape, families move from home to home in record numbers and politics has become more global and less local. Computers themselves — icons of the Information Age — are a cold, impersonal medium of communication. To confront this impersonal world, we must look beyond making the personal political, as SDS did. We must find a way to make the political personal — to make global issues personally relevant to local communities. The issues are there, but they are not framed in a way that engages our generation or makes them seem relevant to us. Our generation is not apathetic, as it is frequently described — we're just starving for someone to make issues personal.

Ultimately, we must make the issues personal for ourselves — no one else is going to do it for us. But in an academic structure that depends on small precepts, such precepts can be the breeders of an activist generation, if we only let them. And we must not inhibit such activism just because it seems, at times, "off-topic." Adam Frankel is from New York City. He can be reached at afrankel@princeton.edu.