Love in academia

Locating the moment when I disavowed the power of magic and myth brought me back to elementary school. In a recent “Colbert Report” interview, guest Cevin Soling made the provocative assertion that students are depressed, irritable and disillusioned with learning in part because schools are designed to quash creativity.

Anyone who remembers the constant bells, demands for silence and “lining up” typical of American public schools also remembers the general frustration of being forced to sit quietly for hours and repeat math problems, readings and handwriting exercises endlessly. Soling, informed by Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, notes that current schools have grown out of the states’ need to control bodies, regulate movement and inculcate docility for the creation of workers who can focus on repetitive tasks that require precision. Schools value a limited conception of creativity that places almost no value on different worldviews.

Colleges provide an alternative model to the extreme routinization of primary and secondary education, but there is still a stifling focus on conformity and control. My experience as a social science student at Princeton has been solitary and chilling. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of hours roving the endless stacks of Firestone Library, poring over the texts of men and women (but mostly men) who have been dead for decades. Their words, syntax and metaphors are not only from a different time but from what seems like a totally different way of interacting with the world. Reading the dense texts of Machiavelli certainly provides insights into the modern world, but it’s hard to imagine the fear, faith and fickle alliances of 15th-century life while sitting in a dimly lit library. In college, I’ve gained an appreciation of the power of magic, myth and alternate world views, but that knowledge is predicated on distance.

Without Princeton, I am certain that I never would’ve read Foucault, Levi-Strauss and a host of other philosophers and academics who have helped me form an increasingly critical mind. But the mode of instruction hasn’t allowed me to understand the peoples, cultures and traditions I study. I’ve learned about witchcraft in Azande culture, but I have no idea of what it really means to be under a spell. One of my professors asked, “How can we recognize a given cultural practice as true?” The understanding of truth I wish to approach isn’t predicated on a belief that the cultural practice is “true for them” but rather an attempt to understand others on their own terms. The models for this type of understanding will vary wildly between — and possibly within — fields of study.

Princeton currently has programs that attempt to bridge the gap between textual learning and the lived experience of others. The Community-Based Learning Initiative (CBLI) offers courses and funding to help students do research in local communities. Unfortunately, CBLI only offers courses in five academic fields next semester. While these courses do provide a different academic experience than one strictly limited to the library, they are still limited in size and scope. Could there ever be a CBLI to help an astronomy student truly appreciate the scale of the universe? Or mathematicians understand the terror of nothingness?

The medium and mode for such a radical re-imagining of academic study may not yet exist and may not be possible or even legal. I can imagine the terror on Cass Cliatt ’96’s face if students smoked peyote so they could understand Native American culture on its own terms. But the four-year university produces a very specific type of knowledge — expressed in books, journals and occasionally film, photography and creative writing. I challenge educators and students to change the terms of our debate. We should ask questions that link between and across academic fields instead of burrowing deeper and deeper into a narrow specialty.

There is no single way to engage and re-envision the basic precepts of academia, and I leave it to people much smarter than me to figure out what can make the subject matter more accessible for their students. In the mean time, I’ll keep asking: Would it be so wrong if Princeton taught us how to believe in the impossible, irrational and magical?

Michael Collins is an anthropology major from Glastonbury, Conn. He can be reached at mjcollin@princeton.edu.