Anti-intellectual pursuits: Too much play or too little work?

We've had some beautiful weather lately. Not maybe in the past week or so, but early March was full of days with people walking around in T-shirts and some even in shorts. I was able to stop wearing socks under my sandals, and that made my week.

I live in Mathey, and it was quite a treat to come back from classes and see people outside in shorts, playing lacrosse or volleyball or guitar. I for one, headed out with my roommate's Crazy Creek (you know, those weird folding chairs your OA leaders had) to do some reading.

I didn't pick my book up right away. Instead, I took in the scene, happy to be a part of what I knew would be one of my happiest memories twenty years from now when I'm trapped behind some desk somewhere worried only about what I can deduct as work related expenses on my income tax form.

I really enjoyed myself at first, but then I realized something. The same people I'd seen playing first lacrosse and then guitar were now heading over to play volleyball. And it wasn't that they had short attention spans, on the contrary I'd say they rather took more time than most for these activities, they had simply spent almost the entire day outside playing.

I know I'm going to come off as a bitter heinous geek saying this, but don't you think there was just a bit of excess in doing that? Assuming they were even wearing sunscreen in the midday sun (highly unlikely I'm guessing) and had finished all their work for the rest of the week (I think it was a Tuesday), didn't they have anything better to do? Sure, fun and games are great, and I tend to think I like them as much as the next person, but we're talking about four or five straight hours of not doing too much at all. I'm as into non-productivity and counter-productivity as anyone else, but it was absurd.

What irritated me about the whole bit is not even what you might think. I didn't mind all the noise they were making in the courtyard. I didn't mind that I had class when they didn't. I didn't mind the fact that I could imagine all of them later complaining in precept that they don't have enough time to finish their work. In fact, I think it's great that they weren't doing schoolwork per se. After all, nothing annoyed me more than the letters I got as a pre-frosh telling me to have a happy and productive summer. What I mind about what I saw is that they had pretty much deliberately sought out mindless activities to waste away the day.

Before I even got to Princeton, I'd heard stereotypes about its students being anti-intellectual. Though I don't think that's uniformly true of the student body, we certainly have some prime examples. It's not terribly difficult to find someone who's more apt to spend free time at the 'Street' rather than reading for pleasure, and in fact how many people do you really know who read for pleasure at all, even during intersession when they can't possibly complain that work prevents them from doing so? People say they get burnt out from reading, but I say you never get tired of something you really love.

That's what the real problem is here. There aren't many people who actually love learning. I know it's next to impossible to find someone who loves everything and won't be bored at any lecture, but come on. I'm sure you too can count off five people among whose primary interests is not a single academic pursuit (I'm sorry if I am being overacting by excluding college basketball as an academic pursuit).

We're supposed to be here primarily to learn. I concur with Dean Fred's advice to become as interesting a person as possible, but I think some people take this to the extreme, or at the very least misinterpret it. It's great to have extracurricular interests; I think guitar players are the coolest people in the world, as a group, and I'm sure you can learn a lot from rugby. Yet, though these are important interests, you have a brain and should be using it for more than that. The primary value of other activities is that they refresh us for our studies and let us think about things in new ways. Having fun is good, but it's not important and shouldn't be a priority, especially when we've worked so hard to be here and are considered so lucky.

We're here to learn; it's our primary occupation right now, not having fun or relaxing. Those things are only to make us better at doing what were supposed to be doing.

I know the comeback here of, 'I don't want school to be me whole life!' And it shouldn't be your whole life, but it damn well better be a big chunk of it. Right now, too many students seem not only to avoid academic work, but actively rebel against it. When we finish midterms, we don't just relax for a bit, we go out and get drunk. How many times did you hear someone say, 'I want to get wasted,' completely forget everything, right after they finish midterms? Don't we value what we're doing? Aileen Ann Nielsen is from Upper Black Eddy, PA. She can be reached at anielsen@princeton.edu.