Activism at Princeton

Over on tumblr, Aku writes:

College rankings are an audience-grab and a crapshoot, I know. They’re not scientific. Still, I couldn’t help but be disappointed that Princeton was #7 on Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s list of Top Colleges for Activists. (ETA: Disappointed that we made it so high, that is.) I’ll get into this in a more sustained way later, but I actually think there’s a lot of resistance to activism on campus (particularly with regards to feminism and gender activism, see above), and that in some ways it’s been institutionalized out of existence. I’d rather not congratulate us just yet; there’s lot’s of work to be done.

What do Princeton people think?

I spent the first half of my Princeton career as an activist. I helped to organize two anarchic, eye-catching protests, one against Proposition 8 and one against the National Organization for Marriage; I helped get Princeton its first gender-neutral housing policy; I wrote about left-wingy and gay things for campus and national periodicals; I put eighty kids on a bus and got us all to D.C. to participate in the 2009 National Equality March. The Tory (a campus right-wing magazine) called me a “campus radical” as if it was a slur. Minor national far-right celebrities character-assassinated me. I was all set to become a minor celebrity too, for being loud and in-your-face and An Activist.

Then I stopped—thanks to Princeton. For one thing, as my academic obligations multiplied, I had no time to organize protests or take days off to go to D.C. or write for campus publications. In my junior fall, my JP took up every spare moment, and there has literally not been a day since then that I have done no academic work. Furthermore, Princeton—and its faculty—helped me to see myself as a historian, a scholar, and to see my academic work as something worthwhile. My mentors helped me to begin to shut off the voices in my head that tell me I am a terrible person, and so I threw myself into my academic work as the Thing I Am Going to Do With My Life. In light of that, I saw aggressive political stances as something antithetical to being a good teacher. I took the partisan bumper stickers off my computer and notebooks. As I started to become an expert in the history of sexual identity, I also began to doubt many of the core assumptions about the “LGBT rights movement” that had informed a lot of my previous activism, and to disagree with the goals of many of the activist projects I could have continued to be involved in.

It’s true that there is a culture at Princeton that punishes taking aggressive political stances on anything. One is supposed to be seen as too clever for partisanship, hence the “apathy” that is also said by those outside Princeton—and anyone inside it who has ever tried to get people to show up to a protest or demonstration—to characterize its students. Maybe this culture permeated my unconscious while I was strategizing about how to be taken seriously by my peers and mentors. But I’ve never really toned down my political views—to many readers, my Facebook page remains as “radical” as ever, and I’ve taken to my blog or the pages of the Prince when I’ve really felt as if I have something to say. Instead, I think I stopped organizing protests because I need to focus on my thesis; because I don’t want “campus radical”—or “queer”—to be the only thing people think of when they hear my name; and because Princeton has taught me that a Facebook post, a dining-hall conversation about my Victorian men who found identity in the writing of Plato and Whitman, or coming to class having done the reading and ready to engage with its and my classmates’ ideas are all forms of activism too.

Going Back

On my last day in Princeton in January, before a frantic dash through a foot of snow to finish packing, move a sofa to my friend’s room, and make the train in time for my red-eye to Heathrow, I invited all my friends to lunch in my favorite place in Princeton, the Rocky dining hall. It was the day after Dean’s Date, the day that all written work for the semester was due, and so the vast majority of my undergrad friends were running on one or maybe two nights without sleep. Some of them showed up only to say goodbye before crashing into bed (by which I was touched); others stayed, and our party spread over tables as I flitted about, chattering manically and making sure to see everyone. One of my friends asked me if I was sad to be leaving. I reflected for a minute, but gave a simple answer: “No.” I assured my friend I’d miss the people, but the place? Not so much. Princeton is a small campus, a small town, and after two and a half years in that little world I felt like I had it figured out. I was ready to move on to pastures new.

And so we slogged back and forth through the snow that day, my friends all performing small acts of heroism at one of the busiest times of the year to get me on my way, and a small party went down to the station to see me off on the 6:09 train. Until one brief visit to campus when I was in the New York/New Jersey area the other week, my last sight of Princeton was two of my best friends waving me goodbye from the platform, as the train chugged its familiar, ponderous way past parking lots and graduate-student apartments and the lake and the canal. No more than twelve hours later, in those startling shifts of time and place that long-distance flights thrust upon one, I was dragging three suitcases up Oxford High Street in the early-morning light, having gotten off the bus one stop too early and not knowing where to turn for Trinity College.

From here we have the pattern of quickly alternating comfort and alienation that regular readers of this blog in the past several months will have come to recognize: the reassuring sight of my exchange partner there to meet me at the porter’s lodge; the seeming crowds of otherworldly students talking about their drinking exploits and using the word “banter” one out of every five; the comforting consistency of tutors’ rooms and library reading rooms and the HQ shelves of the History Faculty Library; the terror of what I had gotten myself into that surfaced in the midst of tipsy disorientation when I was handed a glass of port after my first Trinity Guest Night, my first big Oxford dinner.

At the end of that first week, the port was the last straw: throwing away my resolution not to go on the identity parade at my new university, I begged a friend from America to go with me to the LGBTQ Society’s weekly drinks/social. A series of overtures of friendship, chance meetings, and kindred spirits later, I found myself in different mental spaces entirely: ready to work 8-10 hours a day on my JP over the Easter vacation; and ready to live a life of decadence the whirlwind last few weeks of Trinity term. The middle of June found me not only with a group of close friends whom I ate and drank and danced and laughed and talked about dead languages with, but with whom I also dined once on Trinity high table, passing the port afterwards in the SCR as if six months ago I hadn’t almost cried at the thought of a world where port is drunk. On one occasion, a friend and I dashed through the center of Oxford in a downpour from a lecture to a black-tie dinner, literally tying bow-tie and changing to heels en route. On another occasion, three of us went punting, and it was only when we were halfway up the High Street from Magdalen Bridge, giggling madly, our plastic cups of Pimms still in hand, that we realized how ridiculous we must have looked. On more than one occasion, I walked home to college late enough that a rosy-golden glow just starting to cast its aura over the gray sky. Those last weeks of Oxford were nothing like my life has ever been. And they were some of the happiest weeks of my life.

I left Oxford for the first time on the last day of Trinity term, my emotions and my sleep schedule frazzled after a good three weeks of burning always with this hard, gem-like flame, and when I got off the Eurostar and met a Princeton friend in Paris, I resolved to her my intention to hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life (or, you know, appropriately Hebraic words to that effect). I easily shocked my Princeton friends with stories of how much everyone drank in Oxford, and how I had spent my last few weeks there. It was a good reminder of how at odds I had felt with the culture when I first arrived, and how much had changed that the things I had been scared of in January were things I enjoyed doing with some really good friends in June. And I did reset my equilibrium by living more abstemiously for much of the summer: spending my life working and living for my work, seeing friends where I saw them, and relishing life as a grown-up historian, spending the summer steeped in research as grown-up historians do.

But Oxford is a Siren, and all summer she kept calling me. She called me as I read Symonds documents and thought, as I always do, about the Oxford of his day; she called me as I sought out pleasure reading like Maurice and Jude the Obscure and Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Stranger’s Child, that reminded me of her; and she called me most especially the two times I went back to visit, when my friends were happy to indulge me with all the things I love most in Oxford, and I could be excused—just as I was in the last three weeks of term—for thinking I had stepped into the Paradise of any one of a number of Oxford novels, the Paradise that in novels generally comes before the Fall.

But I forestalled the Fall by leaving, and my last full day in Oxford—either three weeks ago or a lifetime, I’m not so sure—we basked in the sun on the Trinity lawns, visited the Greek gallery of the Ashmolean with its pottery inscribed to beautiful boys, heard my last Christ Church evensong, and wound up at night on my friend’s sofa, watching the TV adaptation of one of the most deeply unsettling—and truest—Oxford stories of a Fall from Paradise, The Line of Beauty. I started reading The Line of Beauty last October, in Princeton, and put it aside because I wasn’t so into it. But I brought it along to Oxford, and I finished it over the Easter vacation, filled with passionate unease for a world of politics and poses and aestheticism that by that point I recognized. The protagonist of The Line of Beauty is a would-be academic seduced by a world of surfaces, and well: which of us isn’t? The novel reminds me how easily young love for a place, for an idea, for sun-drunk excursions on slow-moving rivers and the “delicate satisfaction” of “a most subtle and exquisite curve” (Symonds, not Hollinghurst!), can consume one. Though an unhappy note, it was not an unfitting one on which to end my sojourn.

But all seemed brighter and clearer and less bleak on the afternoon that I left Oxford for the last time (for now), and when I retraced my steps of seven months before from Trinity to the bus station, I had my friends to help me with my bags, to convince me that it was a good idea to stop at the pub on the way, and to toast my speedy return. The image of my friends waving me goodbye as the bus pulled out of the station was an uncanny doubling of the last time I’d left, really left, a university I loved. And just like before I bridged time and space and found myself with alarming speed back in New Jersey, jet-lagged and dazed, my body still burning with that ecstasy that my love affair with Oxford had caused me to maintain.

But I saw in New Jersey the friends who were there to wave goodbye in January, and we made one of our regular madcap road trips (Rhode trips!) to Rhode Island, and I came out here, to my parents in the wilds of British Columbia, far enough away that those weeks and those weekends of decadence seem like a hallucination. And yet I am hatching plans, and dreaming rose-colored dreams. The Fall from Paradise may loom, “et in Arcadia ego,” but I keep thinking of that ecstasy—and wanting it back.

And yet. The thing is, Princeton was home for years, and it is still home now. Today I sat down with my email inbox and my diary and wrote in my class schedule, my work schedule, my appointments, and all the events for freshmen I will have to attend in my new capacity as what we call a Residential College Adviser. Today I became involved in a few conversations on Facebook about a recent change in University policy, and reminded myself that Princeton policy is something I have a stake in, care about, and have helped to shape over the past few years. I remembered how, after a spate of culture shock and alienation in my first semester at Princeton, I found a niche, and I found some wonderful friends, and I made my mark on a school I once worried would swallow me whole. It seems, perhaps, that I was all-too-willing to submit to Oxford and let it have its way with me, let it swallow all it liked, and Line of Beauty-style consequences be damned.

After all, I think that what happened in Oxford is that I fell in love: an intensity of emotion and disregard for rationality that I have never experienced for an individual or indeed for any other place. And it is good, I think, for someone to be 21 and to know what it is like to fall in love, as well as good to know that moderation in all things is important and that self-bettering and the ability to do good come through many kinds of feelings and emotions.

I can’t wait to see what happens when, in one week’s time, I come back to Princeton after having done so much and learned so much and grown so much and felt so much. I can’t wait to write a thesis about places I have been and documents I have seen and mentalités I have known. I can’t wait to feed my advisees tea and cake and talk to them about ideas and maybe, if I’m lucky, light a spark of wanderlust in them that wasn’t there before. And most of all, I can’t wait to have my first meal in the place in Princeton where I had my last: the Rockefeller College dining hall, the only place in the world into which I have ever waltzed as if I owned it. Love affairs aside, the Rocky dining hall was where I gained my first sense of self-worth, purpose, and belonging. For that, it’s worth “going back to Old Nassau.”

On Gender-Neutrality in University Housing, Briefly

One of the central sociopolitical issues of my undergraduate career has been “gender-neutral housing” (GNH), the term commonly used in the U.S. for official university policies that permit undergraduates of different genders to share apartments, suites, or bedrooms (depending on the liberality of the policy). I was on the committee that brought the first GNH policy to Princeton’s on-campus apartments (in which all the bedrooms are single, so the Bedroom Problem didn’t loom as it would it most other housing configurations at Princeton), and since then I’ve remained involved in questions of gender and housing, such as how to get more public and dorm bathrooms available around campus that are non-gendered and hence safe and accessible for transpeople.

I think Princeton is much more rigid about gendering its student living spaces than many other American universities, or at least the ones that I visited when I was a high-school senior picking colleges. But the firestorms in the student press at other Ivy League universities, for example, suggests that it’s not just Princeton being exceptionally more conservative than everyone else. GNH is a very salient issue in American higher ed, and we who are in the habit of trying to present the utter reasonableness of the position that students should be allowed to make their own choices about whom they want to live with have been forced to recognize that others simply don’t see the logic of our position.

And so one of the most interesting things I’ve discovered in my time as a student in the UK is that GNH is an absolute non-issue here. Granted, at UK universities (or, at least, at the ones that can afford it; I think fewer that are not Oxbridge/London can these days), it is far less customary to share bedrooms than it is in the US, so that problem doesn’t tend to rear its head. But everyone I talked to at Oxford about this expressed surprise that people in America would think it extraordinary for men and women students to share university-owned living space. It’s not especially common for Oxford students of different genders to live together, but it’s certainly not unheard of, and in institutional memory (though assuredly at some point shortly after coeducation at the various colleges) there was no point at which a grown-up said they couldn’t.

While I’m doing research in London, I’m staying in a University of London dorm. It’s your very basic, run-of-the-mill student accommodation: 12-story cinderblock square divided into dozens and dozens of tiny little single rooms. I’m on the ninth floor, but I imagine every floor has the same bathroom layout: two single-occupancy WCs, and one big dorm bathroom with showers and sinks and toilets. The bathrooms aren’t gendered at all, and it’s my first experience being in a dorm setting where they aren’t. As someone with a lot of bathroom anxiety—as a teenager, I was with some regularity told I was in the wrong one—I always hesitated to push the envelope, and no one I lived near ever set a precedent for using the closest bathroom, regardless of gender, or voting as a group on how to gender the bathrooms. And so it actually quite surprised me when I realized this evening that I have been using a big bathroom with men and women in it for three days and it didn’t even register. I expected to feel some kind of discomfort or at least novelty at standing at a sink next to a guy, but I didn’t at all. I was brushing my teeth, he was brushing his, and who cares really?

Maybe it helps that in this bathroom the showers all lock on the inside like toilet stalls, instead of having a curtain. I understand why women might feel vulnerable in the Princeton showers; hell, I feel vulnerable in the Princeton showers, where I’ve been inadvertently walked in on a few times, because it’s just really hard to tell whether it’s okay to push aside the curtain. And that’s in bathrooms that are as rigidly gender-segregated as anything I’ve ever seen.

And so I suppose the moral of the story is, it might not hurt some American students to study abroad, to experience a much less politically fraught attitude to communal student living space. In general I think the less we treat student digs like a culture-war battleground, the better off we’ll be.

Culture Shock, Class Consciousness, and the Weather Girls

The week after I arrived in Oxford, months ago now (gosh, that’s strange to say!) I attended the first formal dinner of this whole strange experience, and a couple weeks afterward I found myself writing a long post that attempted to puzzle through and come to terms with the culture shock that dinner occasioned. As your average American academic brat, I grew up attending dinner parties and reading the kinds of books and watching the kinds of movies where the etiquettes of attire, successive courses, and too many forks are deployed. When I came to Princeton, I attended the odd awards dinner or some such thing where I put what I’d learned into practice, making small talk, using my forks and knives correctly, and agonizing too much over the ambiguities of gender-specific dress codes. But as much as I thought I knew how to navigate academic dinners, I found myself stupefied by the performance of pretentious formality that gets carried out every Friday night in Trinity’s dining hall, by sparkly dresses and port and being waited on at table by young women my own age who I felt certain loathed the posh-accented people getting drunk around them. As I processed the experience of that first “Guest Night,” as this production is known, I felt ashamed, ashamed of the fact that I had been complicit in the perpetration of the remnants of the English class system.

Time went on—a term passed—and I got to know more people in Trinity who felt the way I did, left-wingers who greeted these productions with an embarrassed ironic distance and yet managed to take them for what they were and have a good time. I went to another formal dinner, for all the history students hosted by the college history fellows; and when my father came to visit I took him to my second Guest Night. I paced myself, feat-of-endurance-like, through four-course meals; I learned to do the same for massive, by my standards, quantities of red and white and port and sherry. And I went several times a week to normal formal halls, wearing my gown and standing for the Latin grace and turning the alienating thing into something I could value, something that put me closer to understanding Symonds’ Oxford and something that got me out of the library and talking to the people sitting near me for at least an hour a day. I’d look at the portrait of John Henry Newman in Trinity hall and think about another time, another Oxford, and wonder where I as a woman academic stand in relation to it—like Guest Night itself, wanting to understand and yet feeling an irreconcilable distance all the same.

Last week, my friend told me she had an extra ticket for the MCR Gala, Trinity’s annual black-tie banquet for the graduate student body, and would I like to go? I leapt at the chance, and in the days leading up to the event, which was yesterday, I could hardly contain my excitement. I’ve been working hard; I was longing for a celebration; and parties with good friends are always fun. I went out and bought a dress, the first dress I have bought since my high-school prom—ready to play the black-tie game properly, to act the role (with appropriate sense of irony, of course) of one of those Bright Young Things in the costume dramas I’ve always salivated over. I bought my “Big Issue” magazine from the homeless man in front of Blackwell’s on Friday afternoon, and on Friday evening I dressed for dinner. The epithet “champagne socialist” couldn’t possibly have been more apt, I realized, as I started the evening by drinking a glass of champagne and spent the third course bonding with my friend over the large-looming role of the socialist musical and cultural tradition in our upbringings. We talked about how it had made us feel a bit nostalgic, a bit homesick, to see a little May Day trade-unions rally in front of the Bodleian last weekend, and we shared in a sense of outrage about how much sexism there still is in academia. But the ugly juxtaposition of this political sentiment with what we were doing while we said it didn’t really strike home until the President of our college made a rambling after-dinner speech that made several bad jokes at the grad students’ expense, but no reference to the idea that what they do is intellectually important and worth doing; and which in an instance of tastelessness that frankly fills me with disgust and I think is absolutely inexcusable in a retired senior British diplomat, made not only a joke about the death of Osama bin Laden, but a joke whose apparent humor rested on said retired senior British diplomat “accidentally” confusing the names “Obama” and “Osama.” I gaped, speechless and outraged, at my friends while the room erupted into laughter around us. A few minutes later, when someone in the room was, honest to God, “sconced” for supposed “offenses” including speaking in a foreign language, the compartments I’d built in my mind to rationalize my enjoyment of the idea of a black-tie dinner came crashing down. I could see, clearly, why events like these are a big part of the access and equality problems Oxford and Cambridge continue to have. I was embarrassed at myself for being complicit in this sort of nonsense, and embarrassed on behalf of a college and to some extent (though less so) a university that should really, in this day and age, know better.

Like so many things I have been part of since coming to Oxford, all this is not really unique to Oxford, Oxbridge, or England. Elite universities are elite universities wherever you go, and there are unquestionably people in Princeton who behave the way some of the people in Trinity did last night. I have often said that it may be better to be served at table rather than having the kitchen staff hidden away behind servery counters and kitchen walls as they are in the halls at Princeton, just as it may be better to have your bins emptied by someone who comes into your room, whom every morning you need to have a conversation with and whose name you need to know—in Princeton, where the bins are emptied at six in the morning, I have never been awake to ask the name of the person who empties mine. And just because at Trinity displays of wealth and privilege are events that anyone can attend does not mean that the ones that occur at Princeton behind the walls of eating clubs or in the rooms of fraternity, sorority, and certain student organization members are any less insidious. I have been fortunate in finding friends at Princeton who don’t buy into this nonsense, just as I have at Trinity, but the absurdities of last night’s dinner, and the culture shock of my first Guest Night, take me back to the inferiority I felt in my first semester at Princeton, when I was acutely aware that I was not as suave or as smooth-talking as my fellow members of certain student organizations who came from money and had been to prep school. Elite universities are elite universities wherever you go, and if on the one hand that means that once you’ve learned the rules of academia you’re set, it also means that you will find these ugly underbellies wherever you go too. The best thing I can say for the rest of the halls of privilege is that I have never in my life heard anyone who holds academic power say anything as tasteless while speaking in an official capacity as what the President of Trinity said last night, nor do I come from a university culture where faculty and administrators are so obviously complicit in and present at their students’ excesses.

But where does that leave us? Well, it leaves me having to make the awful confession that for all this, I still get a kick out of dressing up like a woman and drinking champagne, and that I would do it again, especially if it were in an environment where I could more readily forget about the ugliness of the display of wealth and privilege. And it also leaves me thinking back to a late, humid New Jersey night a year ago, at the end of the weekend of Reunions that is Princeton’s most grandiose display of money and privilege, when I sated the nausea produced by the parade of alumni classes and their mass consumption of the second-largest annual alcohol order in America by dancing to Madonna in a dark basement with my friends. After Reunions, I got my Princeton back by going to the LGBT alumni’s party, the last event of the weekend. And it wasn’t so much that it was teh gayz, as it was people I knew and loved, and songs that a cultural tradition I adore and respect has adopted as anthems of not-belonging, of survival, and of pride. I will never forget the glowing realization on the face of one of my friends, newly come out, as he realized that he was in a room full of people who, like him, knew all the words to “Like a Prayer”—that, for reasons greater than this, he wasn’t alone. Whether I myself ever participate in Reunions as an alumna, the Princeton that can do that is the Princeton I want to remember.

And so it was late last night, after the MCR gala, when my friends and I with a sense of escape betook ourselves to a gay bar and danced until after 3 in the morning. The air humid after the first rainfall in weeks, all of us dancing as if for our lives in a dimly-lit room permeated by flashing colored lights, gave me back my university experience, my sense of what it means to be a young person, my self-constructed, adopted cultural compass. The DJ played “It’s Raining Men” that night, a song that recalls for me the youthful glee of dance-party protests against the National Organization for Marriage, of road trips up and down I-95, of seeing Martha Wash perform it at Pride that fateful summer in Washington, DC. There are no gay bars in Princeton. There is no reason I would ever have to wear black tie there. But turning my face to the ceiling and laughing aloud while shouting the words to my favorite gay anthem, still in my ankle-length dress and my jewelry and my high-heeled pumps, I felt a powerful sense of continuity. We make our own worlds, our own communities, our own senses of ownership and control. We adopt our own anthems—whether the solidarity stems from the sentiments of the Internationale or those of “I Will Survive.” Like drag queens, like the great Harlem ball culture, we can, if we wish, all make opulence and glamor into something we can understand, own, and be part of.

And really, I suppose that’s the point: there is nothing evil in wearing a dress, in having a fancy meal, in playing game-like by the rules of a kind of class culture that shouldn’t properly have a place in modern-day Britain (or America). Because simply by doing and living we can all invert, subvert, and parody these conventions until they are something which we find ourselves capable of delighting and glorying in. I had my stereotypically Oxonian debauched formal evening. I played the game. But it is the sight of half a dozen of my friends, faces glowing, bowties undone and dresses askew, all of them shouting “Hallelujah, it’s raining men!”, that I hope to remember for years to come.

Shameless Self-Promotion

In response to an op-ed in the Daily Princetonian on Monday, which argued that Princeton should institute a core economics requirement, I have written a jeremiad:

Princeton does not require that its undergraduates take courses in any particular department, and so Berger’s call for an economics requirement reads as an assumption that the discipline is more valuable to the world than others. But it is problematic to prioritize economics as a lens through which to view the world. As critics of political economy have been arguing since Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations,” viewing historical and individual development primarily in terms of the creation, accumulation and transfer of wealth is dehumanizing. It erases from our understanding of the world all the things which differentiate us from computers: our abilities to love, to empathize, to feel happiness and sadness, to make decisions for ourselves and for our families and communities, to organize our actions around a desire to be better people — and “to form a more perfect Union.”

It is for this reason that Princeton’s ideal of a liberal arts education “in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations” does not privilege economics above any other discipline. Students are given a grounding in many analytical methods but not in any one set of assumptions about the values which should guide national and international development. The philosophy of a liberal arts education holds that young people can better serve their nation and all nations if they have four years during which they can develop their critical faculties and their moral compasses and decide for themselves what it means to live a good life. It holds that we are at university to develop our minds and our souls, not our “Monopoly” properties.

Please read the rest. Then read my friend and colleague Luke Massa’s thought-provoking piece, also in today’s Prince, which articulates a theory of positive liberty with respect to our coursework. And then think about where you stand on the question of education for education’s sake.

“better”; or, A Brief (Rather Cryptic) Meditation on Human Flourishing

It was a long, full weekend between first and second weeks. As I make a to-do list just now, at the end of Sunday night, and reflect on all the pages I haven’t yet read for this week’s classes, I think about all the things I have done in the past three days: all the hours I’ve spent talking that I might have spent reading; all the hours I spent reading that I wish I could have spent talking, had my academic demands not presented themselves so pointedly; and the strange little pieces of insight and accomplishment I snatched out of an ordinary weekend of anxiety and mounting lists as I find myself confronted by the enormity of a semester’s worth of work still to come. But this weekend I had some rewarding conversations, to be sure; and I discovered that I seem to have some sort of bizarrely unexpected talent for improvisational vegan baking (I’ve certainly never been good at anything to do with kitchens before); and I helped someone in what seemed to me to be a very small way, just with a short list of technology-related questions to which I happened to know the answers, but which in answering I came to realize stood for far greater points to be made about human nature, about human flourishing, and about how to stay strong amidst deadlines and the endless pressure that is aspiring to academic perfection.

I was there to be of technical use because I was doing my usual routine in the dining hall, eating my unhealthy food and drinking my shitty coffee and talking to everyone, and thus I was in the reach of someone who needed someone to accost in order to have his need for small technical answers gratified. And it was a joy to me to spend some Saturday afternoon in so gratifying, because for the service I rendered him he repaid me in the most heartwarming and caring grateful conversation I am sure I have ever encountered from someone to whom I’m not closely blood-related. In more hours than the ones I spent on this small task, it is this someone more than any other who has instilled in me a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose. It would certainly be indiscreet to elaborate further, but perhaps the title of this post will give at least some readers a clue. Suffice to say that the task I was able to complete reminded me what I have learned in the past two years about doing one’s best, being one’s best, and using both these strivings to overcome the crippling insecurity of a neurotic life on the margins of the Ivy League. Suffice to say that when I feel as if I belong at Princeton, I know whom I ought to begin by thanking.

I lay out the story of my Saturday in the vaguest of terms so that I can go on to suggest that my Saturday is entwined inextricably with Princeton itself, and with the idea of Princeton, beyond the connections which the actors in this story, its setting, or indeed any psychological drama so superficial as my “legacy complex” would suggest. I cannot help but think that no other of the places I might have gone to university would have given me a dining hall where such an encounter of social democracy could occur; I cannot help but think that the culture of no other university would permit questions of “bettering” to be the takeaway from an afternoon playing at tech support, no matter the predispositions of my anecdote’s characters to considering such questions (and reader, those predispositions: they are many).

I have been thinking recently—particularly as I completed a survey about opportunities for women’s leadership at Princeton—about this university’s struggle to remake itself. Today Princeton is an institution profoundly concerned with the desire to right its past wrongs: to bring those it previously cast to the margins into the middle, to open its ranks to all who are entitled to enter, to make all its students feel as if they are welcome and valued. I know from my experiences and those of my friends that our ivory-towered four-year home is not always so very successful at fulfilling its promise of a clean break with a reprehensibly old-boys’-club past, but to look around the university today is to see those who would not have been allowed through its gates in the past; to walk through campus today is to feel as if one no longer has to fight quite so fiercely to belong; to be involved (even as an observer) in campus politics is to become closely acquainted with and invested in the desire to be better, to transcend past sins and poor judgment calls. I feel as if it is only here—in a place preoccupied with its own history, self-regarding and self-referential enough to make the call to progressive improvement into a kind of whig-history call to prayer—that Saturday afternoon tech support could become so clearly a call to arms in the war of careful self-improvement.

For reasons not entirely related to the train of thought running through my mind while I wrestled with network settings that Saturday, I came home once all was resolved and looked up the Greek word εὐδαιμονία. Transliterated “eudaimonia,” it’s a concept central to most of the ancient philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics. It could be translated as “happiness,” or, in a formulation I really happen to enjoy, “human flourishing.” The thing is that most of the canonical ancient philosophers disagreed as to what, precisely, εὐδαιμονία entailed; most of them disagreed as to how virtuous your life need be to be εὐδαιμον. But most, it seems to me (of course, I could be entirely wrong; all I did was read a few articles online), agreed on one thing: εὐδαιμονία was an end, a moral end, an aspirational end. Nirvana, but less absolute and more subjective and as secular as you want it to be. It’s a promise, and a call. And, for me, it’s what is at the end of a life of learning and teaching: a life of the deep interpersonal relationships only pedagogy can form, wherein perhaps attaining εὐδαιμονία rests upon listening to the words of your teachers as best as you can to make yourself better, and then taking careful notes and preparing your own lectures and doing as well by your students as your teachers have done for you.

I said to someone last night—in a conversation which began with my mentioning, briefly, my role as tech support in the course of my day—that I may eat with my friends, spread out across the campus, but I couldn’t imagine, for as long as my time at Princeton lasts, living anywhere else but the college that is my home. The weight of this declaration is only just sinking in 24 hours later, as two things occur to me. The first is that this must be because I cannot think of leaving this college until I have given back to it and its students all the spirit-sustaining goodness that it has given me. The second is that if Princeton’s administration should ever need proof that it is succeeding in its efforts to right its previous iterations’ wrongs, it need look no further than my testimony. I could fail my thesis two Junes hence; I could barely pass my way to commencement and kiss an academic career goodbye, and yet my undergraduate education would still have taught me the most important thing of all: that we all, universities and their teachers and students alike, must seek to be better, to be εὐδαιμον, and to our own selves to be true.

The Trauma of Theory: A Cautionary Tale

I had my first run-in with literary theory in the spring of my freshman year. I was halfway through my first college English class and thought I knew everything; I figured that because I’d read Paradise Lost and was increasingly able to follow along when I heard graduate students talk about their work, I’d be able to listen to a faculty member I knew give a paper on a panel concerning a topic in which I was interested, and know when to smile and nod. I let some people talk me into attending this panel, and I knocked off my work-study job to stand in the back of an overflowing auditorium, full of optimism and full of myself.

And boy, was I sure mistaken. Not only did I not understand the poem the speaker was discussing when she passed around photocopies of it; I didn’t understand a single word she said about it. I don’t remember, today, what the title of the talk was, or what argument she might have said she was intending to make; I only remember blank incomprehension, and confusion, and shame. I remember becoming increasingly worried and upset as I failed to grasp anything, failed to understand why what the speaker was saying was important to an understanding of the poem, failed to nod or chuckle with the rest of the audience. I ducked out before the end of the panel, too ashamed of my lack of understanding to drink the coffee, pick over the fruit tray, and say hi to the people in the audience whom I knew. I went home and cried. Though surely no one in the audience even noticed me, much less knew how confused I was, I felt as if I’d been exposed as a pretentious fool, and I realized how ridiculous I’d been to think that half a semester of intro lit could have prepared me for the rigors of professional literary criticism, or indeed the realities of the professional academic world. A few English classes and theory talks later, I have learned enough to watch the people in the audience whom I think are clever and nod when they nod; I have learned to stay for the fruit tray and let myself be introduced to people no doubt wondering what this awkward undergrad was doing at their talk; every so often I can grab hold of a sentence out of the paper which relates to something I’ve read or learned from a class, something which reminds me that the speaker isn’t talking in a foreign language after all. And I have come to accept that, as an undergrad, as not even an English major, as someone of merely average intellect who hasn’t read the theorists the academics make use of in their talks, there is no reason why I should understand the strange language they speak, their inscrutable methods of making sense out of a text which to the uninitiated sound quite all Greek (or perhaps all French, given the context, except that I actually do understand French, and what they say doesn’t sound like any of the French I know). Even if I can cope, now, with this incomprehension—enough to keep masochistically putting myself through the routine, in the hopes that someday I will understand—that afternoon at that first panel remains one of the most frightening and embarrassing moments of the first half of my undergraduate career. For someone such as me whose sense of self-worth is rooted nearly entirely in the degree to which she’s taken seriously by professional academics, there is nothing quite so awful as it being so matter-of-factly demonstrated to you what an outsider you are.

I was reminded of this episode today not only because, with twelve days to go until I’m back on campus, I can think of nothing other than the academic world; but because I read Adam Kirsch’s brief obit of Frank Kermode in Slate. Kermode is one of the people whose name has entered my sphere of awareness through the academic conversations on which I habitually eavesdrop; like so many such names, I’ve never actually read his work, a fact which, like it does with so many other such names, never fails to produce a distinct feeling of shame. The point, however, is that I can’t comment on Kermode’s views of the state of literary criticism today except through Kirsch’s interpretation of them, which will no doubt expose me as a charlatan far more obviously than my failure to understand theory talks does; however, what Kirsch says does have some bearing on that very problem of failure to understand theory talks. According to Kirsch, Kermode expressed considerable concern about the inaccessibility and hyperspecialization of literary theory, and the modern habit of scholars of literature of keeping the public (like me) unable to understand what it is they do—due, I suppose, to their reliance on a particularly inscrutable and difficult set of secondary literature. Kirsch pays tribute to Kermode’s status as a consummate generalist and a popular critic in the London Review of Books (which he helped to found) and other publications, labeling this manner of practicing lit crit a dying breed in favorable contrast to the theorists.

And, well, it’s difficult not to sympathize with this perspective. As cognizant as I am that my failure to understand theory is probably due either to my own stupidity or my lack of initiative at studying on my own the fundamental theory texts which would help my understanding of that world, I must to some extent think that the sense of alienation I feel isn’t entirely my fault. I’ve taken a number of English classes for someone who isn’t a major, have dabbled in theory, have done my best to understand what it is my friends and my colleagues in my sister department do. And I have come to believe in the relevance of theory to understanding our world: when it’s explained in a simplistic way for undergrads to understand, I’ve gotten excited by it; I’ve seen firsthand the transformative power of, for example, queer theory on a queer person’s understanding of hirself and the world, and that’s a good thing. But I do find myself agreeing with Kirsch (and perhaps Kermode, though as I said, I don’t have a good sense of how much Kirsch is quoting Kermode, and how much he’s offering his own take) that what the academic practice of literary criticism and theory so insulates itself from the world of people who don’t have advanced degrees in the subject, we have a serious cultural problem which matters a great deal.

But why does it matter so much? After all, one Ivy-League-brat-with-self-esteem-issues’ self-absorbed feelings of alienation are probably not that important in the scheme of things. Recasting the language of literary criticism such that someone who hasn’t read a single post-structuralist could still engage with the process of thinking about literature won’t help to eliminate world poverty and hunger or stop global warming or bring relief to the flood victims in Pakistan. But a citizenry which sees the practice of humanistic inquiry as part of its time could restore reason and civility to the political sphere. It could find in itself a desire to reinvest in education and the arts in the name of the next generation. It could, regardless of whether there is such a thing as narrative or such a thing as reality or such a thing as authorial intent, become interested in scrutinizing the claims of politicians and pundits who take even more fast-and-furious approaches to Truth than do literary critics. Because, see, the fact is that we need the humanities. The practice of the close study of texts makes us better citizens, better thinkers, perhaps even better people. But if that study is not just hidden in an ivory tower, but hidden behind a wall of words, it’s going to be very difficult indeed to make the case for its survival to a public which cannot understand what it is that humanists do.

Of course, it would be lovely if we lived in a world in which people said, “I do not have the knowledge or cultural capital to understand your work or the culture in which it exists, and yet I will take your word for its importance.” But, as we all know by reading daily news which attests to the systematic defunding and vocationalizing of higher education, this is not the world in which we live. We live in a world in which intellectual culture must be rigorously defended as a good in itself, and in which a discourse which can bridge the gap between the closed circle of the academic conference panel and the larger western culture of anti-intellectualism is yet to be outlined. In order to do this, it seems to me as if it is necessary to rethink academic culture into something which is not dedicated to separating insiders from outsiders, and to rethink literary studies in particular into something which does not reward mere inscrutability and punish and induce shame in those who are not members of the club. This is not to say that theory has no place in the practice of understanding the world and its texts (or films, or music, or art, or culture), but rather simply to point out how difficult it will be to make a case for the humanities going forward, if the Frank Kermodes of this world really are such a dying breed. We have our work cut out for us—and I especially. Not only do I feel as if I need to begin to consider what it means to belong to the next generation of humanists still in the process of learning what it means to be engaged in this project of understanding the world through its texts; I need also, I feel, to do the reading and listening necessary such that I can loiter unseen in the back of an auditorium, listen to a scholar speak, and not feel quite so hopelessly, shamefully left out of a culture in which I want so desperately to be taken seriously and to belong. Once I feel I have moved beyond the stage of twenty-year-old charlatan, perhaps I can start to articulate a humanism I can call my own—but is it too much to ask that the theorists should meet me halfway?

A Word From Your Friendly Neighborhood Peer Academic Advisor

As I spend more time reading the professorial blogosphere, I find myself more frequently tempted to comment on academic questions I, as a college junior, am far underqualified to have an opinion about. I may be awfully opinionated, but you should probably listen to the professionals if you actually want to learn anything useful about life in the academy. That said, though, I was just barely, bureaucratically ineligible from becoming a peer academic adviser for freshmen in my college this year, and I have plenty of thoughts about what I did right and wrong in my first two years of university that may be worth sharing with my now-nonexistent advisees.

In the spirit of Historiann’s recent post about undergrad satisfaction and regrets, Tenured Radical’s advice to faculty academic advisors (no, I still don’t know whether “advisors” or “advisers” is correct, so I’m using both), and the multiple letters I’ve already gotten this summer from frosh and sophomores who want some advice on choosing classes; and in order to offer a more constructive tone than that of my whiny distribution requirements post of a couple weeks ago, I offer here some thoughts directed at first- and second-year university students trying to navigate a new academic world. These thoughts are probably better-suited to academically serious students for whom college is more about learning and intellectual development than it is about anything else (not to say that’s what college has to be; some students feel that way and some don’t), but I don’t see why it shouldn’t apply to anyone concerned about making the right choices and learning to decipher academia.

Listen to the experts. As Tenured Radical indicated in her post, the online rumor-mill is of limited use in determining which classes to take, especially if you’re looking for good classes and not just easy or fun ones. But many’s the time I’ve ignored the advice of a professor or grad student who knew me, knew the person teaching the class, and knew that I wouldn’t find the professor or the material a good fit for me. Work on politely phrasing questions such that you can ask a professor not what she thinks of her colleague’s teaching, but whether her colleague’s class would be a good fit for you. And if she says it wouldn’t, pay good attention to that recommendation.

Keep an eye out for professors’ names. Often I’ll ask frosh who’s teaching a particular class, and they’ll say they’ve forgotten the professor’s name. But a class taught by a fantastic professor, even if its topic is outside your immediate area of interest, is a better use of your time than a class in your area of interest taught by an unremarkable professor, and so it’s advisable to remember those names. This is where listening to the experts comes in, as some sources on who the best professors are will be more reliable than others. If you’re torn between the professor and the subject matter, take the professor every time. And be aware that a lot of different people teach, e.g., Victorian literature, or the American history survey, or SOC 101, and you might want to wait to take the class until the best professor is teaching it.

Be careful about what you can handle. Starker than the social divide between undergrads and “sketchy” grad students is the divide between the humanities and the sciences. If you’re a humanities major like me, you probably grew up thinking that as a “humanities person,” you couldn’t possibly be any good at math or science. You may have picked your first semester’s courses thinking that since your SAT math score was on the low side, you couldn’t possibly handle a college-level quantitative class, and so you decided to sign up for the easiest quantitative class in the whole university, a computer science class whose syllabus explained quite clearly that it was going to repeat a lot of material you’d already learned in high-school computer science. (This may or may not have happened to me.) That syllabus, dear frosh, is a good indication that you’re not going to learn anything from the class, and that you should consider taking one which will teach some new concepts.

This is not to say, however, that you need to choose the most challenging thing in all areas outside the ones in which you’re confident. To fulfill my lab science requirement, I took physical anthropology and environmental science: not taxing in the same way university-level physics or chemistry is, but nevertheless useful, interesting, and well-taught, and therefore not a waste of time. If, when you’re honest with yourself, it seems that it would take more work to pass intro physics than it would to get an A in your required departmental seminar, it’s probably best to leave yourself the time to get the A in your required departmental seminar.

Plan ahead. It’s probably just a tad neurotic to make a plan for what you’re going to take every semester for the next four years (which is not to say that I haven’t done it…), but you’ll find that it will benefit you to think farther ahead than the next semester. By the time you’re halfway through college, the number of course slots you have left will start to look increasingly finite (especially if, like me, you’re planning on a semester abroad), and you’ll find yourself having to make difficult choices between queer theory and colonial American history, or suddenly realizing that the course you’ve wanted to take since you sent in your matriculation forms is only offered in one of your four years. It might be worth looking through the course catalog, making a list of all the classes you feel as if you can’t possibly graduate without taking, and keeping an eye out for those titles every semester.

Start a new language. Obviously if you’re an engineer or premed or have three majors this is more tricky, but college is really the best time in your life to start a language you missed when you were young, and I regret only continuing the ones I began in junior high and high school. You may want to think about which new language will help you most in your future areas of academic or professional interest, but studying a language for which you can’t see any possible “use” is still worth it, and is “useful” for its own sake; I really regret chickening out of starting ancient Greek. Which brings me to my next point:

College doesn’t have to be vocational school. College students seem increasingly to be thinking of their bachelor’s degrees as discipline-specific professional credentials which will prepare them for specific career paths, or which just sound vocational (first-years of the world, academic economics is not the same thing as business or accounting!). There’s nothing inherently wrong in this, but you should know that there’s no reason to feel pressured to study something “useful” or something which has the same name as a profession. Not only can you certainly have any kind of successful professional life with an undergrad degree in any field, but studying what you love is important in and of itself. You should figure out which classes you enjoy the most and find most intellectually stimulating, and then continue to take those classes. You’ve got enough time to develop a career—right now, it’s time to learn how to think, and how to love to think.

This goes doubly for grad-school-bound kids. Just because you’re majoring in a not-usually-vocational subject doesn’t mean you can’t make it vocational by locking yourself into a path focused solely on grad school admissions and on making preparations to succeed in the professional world of academia. Your professors can advise you on what you need to do now to be prepared for grad school (and indeed whether you should apply at all), but it doesn’t hurt to distinguish undergrad from the rest of your life. Your undergraduate thesis is not a dissertation, your A- in a departmental seminar will not sabotage your chances of getting into a top program, and trying out courses across the curriculum won’t prevent you from being good at your intended field of study. You’ve got 5-10 years in grad school to become a specialist and to lose sleep over the job market; undergrad is not the right time.

Try out possible majors early. If your system is like the one at my school and you have to declare a major the spring of your sophomore year, you’ll probably want to take introductory/survey lectures in a variety of different departments your first few semesters. In terms of figuring out what you want to learn about for the next few years and possibly longer, doing this kind of exploration is more important than knocking out core-curriculum requirements just for the sake of knocking out requirements. While I regret some choices I made in my requirement-juggling, pushing the philosophy and science requirements till junior and senior years in order to try out sociology and English was not one of them. By taking sociology early on, I avoided making a terrible mistake when I discovered that I actually don’t like data; by taking English early on, I found a second home which has enriched my study of history in countless ways. And, indeed, don’t just stick to intro classes: by making time in my freshman-year schedule for an upper-division history course, I came in through a back door which got me much more enthusiastic about the discipline than subsequent more intro-level courses have.

However, there’s no need to take this selection process too seriously: your undergrad major does not determine the rest of your life. As per the comments about vocational education above, your undergrad major will probably have very little impact on what you do as an adult, even if you’re grad-school-bound. I know so many academics who have changed fields, it’s not funny—so study what you want to study right now, and let the rest follow.

Be skeptical about all-freshman programs. Your university is probably selling you a line about the “first-year experience,” and about how rewarding taking a freshman seminar would be, but I’ll be frank: a class entirely populated by first-years isn’t going to challenge you very much. This is not to say that just because you’re an academically serious student you’ll be better at college than everyone else in the class, but taking a lot of all-freshmen classes, while less scary than being in classes with mostly older students, can limit your opportunities to seek out mentors among the older undergrads and grad students who, in my experience, will make the difference in your undergraduate education.

The bright side of special small classes for first-years, particularly if you’re in a field or at a university which doesn’t otherwise offer a lot of small seminars, is that they can get you in contact with faculty early on, which is much harder to achieve in intro lectures with hundreds of students. I became a research assistant for the professor of the freshman seminar I took my first spring. Helping him do archival research and organize his primary sources that summer not only convinced me I wanted to be a historian and, practically speaking, taught me a lot more about research skills than I’d gotten in my classes so far; it also gave me a lasting mentor on the faculty. Such opportunities are not to be sneezed at, and can be worth 12-15 weeks of not learning a whole lot from your classmates.

Only compare yourself to yourself. In my first year I wasted hours sobbing to myself about whether my comments in class discussion were as clever as my prep school-educated classmates’, or whether I deserved to be at Princeton even though I couldn’t reference as many post-structuralists in casual conversation as some of my more pretentious classmates could. But I’ve learned not to worry: when professors evaluate your work, they’re not doing so on the basis of how frequently you can name-drop Lacan. As a first- or second-year, you cannot expect yourself to be as well-versed in disciplinary methodology or jargon as older students who have been in your department for a couple years and have done a lot more work in the discipline. Just make sure that you’re consistently putting in the most effort and turning in the best work that you can sanely manage, ignore the students who are obviously just bullshitting, and allow the ones who really know what they’re talking about to teach you how to talk the talk of a budding historian, or whatever it is you should happen to be.

Have fun, but carefully. For the academically serious student, a creative non-fiction writing workshop is a good “fun” class, and a worthwhile addition to your schedule. A 450-person children’s literature lecture largely populated by jocky fraternity and sorority members who spend the entire lecture talking about their upcoming rager may be more frustrating than “fun.” (I’ve done both.) It’s not wise to take only the most challenging classes, especially if you’re taking more than the required number of courses/credits; you’ll burn out. An arts class in which you turn in a painting or a performance can be a much-needed change from a barrage of 8-10-page analytic essays. But “easy” and “fun” are very different things. You’ll regret “easy” halfway through the semester when you’re in discussion section, no one’s done enough of the reading to have a conversation, everyone’s checking Facebook on their phones, and the poor instructor has long since given up holding the entire class’s attention. You’ll find yourself wanting to check Facebook, too, and let me tell you: it’s all downhill from there. If you’re uncertain about whether a class will be “easy” or “fun,” ask for advice.

And the moral of the story is…

Talk to adults. When you start college, you’re still a kid. You think the way you were taught to think in high school; you’re unused to making decisions (whether academic or otherwise) for yourself; unless you’re an academic brat, you’re probably unfamiliar with the arcanities of academic culture. Obviously, this is not your fault; it’s just the way things are, and at times academia can be a bit too impenetrable for its own good. But your next four years will be a lot more pleasant if you can crack the system, and it’s faculty and staff members, graduate students, and older undergrads who can help you make this transition both to adulthood and to an academic community. If you’re an academically serious student, regardless of whether you want to spend your life in academia, I can guarantee you that your life will be changed and your worldview will be opened if you allow your path to cross with those of older friend-mentors. Visit office hours. Accept dinner, lunch, and coffee invitations. (In my first year, I declined a coffee invitation from a grad student. I was shy and hadn’t yet figured out the social rules of meeting people for coffee, and that he was being friendly, not creepy. He could have been my friend, and I regret it to this day.) If you go to the sort of school where grown-ups eat in your dining hall and grad students and faculty members live in your residential system, sit down at their tables or knock on their doors. (If you don’t go to this kind of university, it’s certainly more difficult to meet grown-ups, but I’m given to understand it’s not impossible.) Ask them about your courses, but also talk to them about the books you’re reading, the things you’ve seen in the news, the brave new world you’re just beginning to puzzle through. Ask them about their work: you might discover a new area of interest. It’s not every four years that you’ll get the chance to live in a community populated by people in all different stages of life and intellectual development, and this is the most valuable thing you can get out of college. It certainly has made all the difference to my undergraduate education.

In fact, I think Tenured Radical’s academic-advising post made this point most effectively:

Needless to say, I made some spectacular errors in that first two years and had some great successes, all of which had to do with the opportunities and pitfalls of a large university. Would things have been different with a more attentive advisor? I doubt it. It wasn’t until, entirely by accident, I fell in with a group of graduate students and became invested in being regarded as — not a good student, but scholarly — that things straightened out for me.

This is actually the story of my life, so I feel qualified to endorse the strategy of seeking out mentors and not worrying too much about whether you’ve correctly distinguished one core requirement from another. Focus on having the time of your intellectual life and allowing your world to be opened and changed, and the rest will follow.

And dear readers, if you have any of your own advice for the Class of 2014, do leave it in the comments!

Madison Mornings; or, Homes and Homecomings

a work in progress

When I feel the dampness of summer on the east coast—eighty or ninety percent humidity, mosquitoes during the day and fireflies at dusk, clothes sticking to my body and a slow laziness to the air that prevents me from reading more than a page before dozing off—I have a curious flashback to Madison, Wisconsin. I spent two weeks in Madison five years ago, my first experience of east-coast summer in several years. We rode our bikes around the lake; we had barbecues in the front yard; we lit citronella candles as the sun set late. I remember Madison as quintessentially summery, like the summers of children’s books from another era—the only difference being my first-generation iPod mini and its Scottish folk music. I was fifteen and hadn’t yet discovered rock, and the fiddles and pipes and accordions and guitars took me on long walks in the stickiness of midday or on long drives through pitch darkness from Shakespeare festivals or dinner parties back to our sublet. Now, when I’m in New Jersey and the temperature first climbs above 80, or the first dinnertime thunderstorm rumbles in the distance, I find myself back in that state-capital college-town green-tree lake-shore summer.

I was in Madison because I am an academic brat. My father was teaching a summer seminar at University of Wisconsin-Madison and so we all followed, as we do. We sublet the house of a professor on leave in some foreign country; we hung around the campus but also played tourist in this university town different from our own. We had dinner parties and party parties with our ad hoc academic enclave, where my sister and I talked Shakespeare and Democratic party politics and played video games with the other professors’ nerdy kids, or chattered at kind and well-meaning faculty spouses about our summer camps and our favorite subjects in school, while the professors talked shop and the grad students drank beer out of bottles and gossiped about who might have a job where. My memories of Madison are at times as hazy as the hot and sticky air by the lake (I know we were only there for a few weeks, but in my recollection those weeks stretch out into an entire pastoral novel), but what I remember principally about Madison was the humidity and the feeling of belonging to an academic enclave. In San Diego, where professors and their families live all over the city, and there are three major universities and several minor ones, we have no academic ghetto. The seminar my father was running, on the other hand, condensed time and space: a set of far-flung colleagues from across the country into one college town and a circuit of department parties into one summer term. It was one of the strongest experiences of community belonging I can recall—and perhaps, then, it is no surprise that the slightest touch of dampness in the air, the lowest rumble of thunder in the distance, sends me back.

—–

Last Tuesday was one of these Madison days, when the fan was on all night and I woke up at 7am to a morning already sticky and still. My alarm was set to three hours earlier than normal because 1,166 seniors and 804 graduate students were receiving degrees from Princeton that morning, and I was being paid $10.90 an hour to stand outside in the 90-degree heat in a shirt and slacks and an academic gown in order to take tickets and direct traffic and tell parents that, no, they could not enter the seating area two hours early; and, no, they could not sit in the reserved section without a ticket; and, no, they could not stand in the way of the academic procession and impede the progress of the president, the board of trustees, and the honorary degree recipients. For three hours, my gown caught on the mechanisms of folding chairs and I took orange tickets from antsy parents while my mind wandered off to bikes and lakes and citronella candles and Scottish accordions.

But it was not just the weather which made Tuesday a Madison morning; it was also all the trappings of academe. The cumbersome black gown signified that I belonged to the same community as the seniors in black; the graduate students in black with orange stripes; and the faculty, trustees, and honorary degree recipients in their rainbow of regalia. There is something unifying and meritocratizing, I find, about academic regalia: it suggests that we are all engaged in the same project of celebrating not just the degree recipients, but also the very existence of the institution of higher education. Watching the graduates process, I felt certain that I would someday have a hood to wear with my gown, and even someday have three velvet stripes on my sleeves. In hearing the formal rhetoric (some of it in Latin) which conferred degrees upon my friends and colleagues, I felt invested in and excited by the mission of my university and of the university in general. When, at commencement’s conclusion, I and my fellow ushers lined the path of the recessional, I felt a great sense of membership in a common mission to educate, to produce knowledge, and to credential the next generation to do the same. Wherever we stand in the hierarchy, whether we have hoods and caps and stripes on our sleeves or not, we are all a part of this mission—not dissimilarly from how it was in Madison, when I talked Shakespeare with the other professors’ kids in imitation of our parents talking shop.

—–

Three days of alumni reunions precede the three days of commencement exercises at Princeton, and I expect that this former celebration is where the majority of the tens of thousands of people who descended upon Princeton’s campus that weekend found their community. I witnessed their exuberant rediscovery of old friendships, their rampant alcohol consumption, their orange-and-black school spirit, and their participation in the parade of alumni classes which for four hours winds its annual way down the road which cuts through the center of campus. It was difficult not to take part in bits of the three-day bacchanal, and I chanted my school-spirit cheers along with the rest of the crowd, perhaps finally singing our alma mater enough times to remember about half of the words.

And yet while reunions proved an enjoyable three days of dancing with good friends, they also left me profoundly unsettled. The event is no celebration of the University (qua cultural institution), as I have known it for the past twenty years and four months. Rather, it is a celebration of Princeton: of old white men and cheap watery college beer, of entitlement and privilege. The nausea I felt when one class of alumni somewhere in the 1970s carried signs lauding the percentage of their class making six-figure salaries and the percentage of their class whose children had also attended Princeton was not entirely assuaged by the jubilation I felt when the crowds cheered for the first classes to graduate women. I woke up on each of three mornings to the disgusting and dispiriting sight of my quad—my home for the past nine months, the center of my residential college and thus my emotional life—covered in garbage, stinking of vomit and stale beer, and I was furious with the alumni whose 45th reunion had snatched my quad away from me, from my university, and from my sense of university. I felt displaced and ill-at-ease, driven from what I’d come to think of as my home.

I was able to recoup some sense of belonging when I went to the LGBT alumni’s Saturday-night party, a lame little student-center-basement event made much less lame by dance music I knew the words to, welcoming friends, and a sense of being among “my people.” Knowing nearly everyone in the room, and dancing with nearly everyone I knew, shifted the dynamic of reunions from something which displaced me to something which welcomed me, and I felt once more that—Milwaukee’s Best-drinking old white men striving towards the Platonic ideal of entitlement notwithstanding—there is a place for me in 21st-century Princeton. It was a sloppy little party at the end of the bacchanal, populated by a ragtag collection of queer kids who’d had too much to drink. But when we all wandered off in the early hours of the morning, it was at least after having been in a multipurpose room where everyone knows your name, and where orange, black, and massive and omnipresent class-consciousness were less important than Lady Gaga to having a good time.

Since, however, it was only the queer party’s dissimilarity to the rest of reunions which saved it from being condemned with the rest of the debauchery, it would take more than a few Madonna songs for me to restore my faith in Princeton as ivory-towered home. This would instead entail three days of listening to speeches and pointing people to the nearest restroom; of entertaining myself by guessing professors’ grad schools by the color of their gowns; and of feeling not-so-secretly thrilled every time I got a smile from a be-regalia’d professor processing past me. By the time Tuesday morning came around, I felt more solidarity with anyone wearing a black gown than I did with anyone shouting “Tiger tiger tiger sis sis sis boom boom bah!” I was proud that I have apparently, after all these years, retained enough Latin to make sense of the salutatorian’s address; I helped to instigate a standing ovation for Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she received an honorary degree; and I applauded wildly President Tilghman’s address, in which she admirably called upon our generation of Princeton graduates to return maturity and civility to the public discourse. Eventually, chatting at my residential college’s reception with the faculty, graduate students, and staff who comprise my surrogate family, Madison morning slid into Madison afternoon—and I was back at the end-of-the-summer-seminar barbecue, telling the academics who all my life have been my literal and metaphorical family about my plans for the summer and then going back for seconds of pineapple and watermelon.

—–

I write this now in Rhode Island, having put my books in boxes and left campus for a while. Maybe I’ll spend some time at my parents’ university when I’m home this summer, but for the next little while I’m among dear friends who don’t play the academic game. It’s summer vacation, and I for one am glad, after a hectic and stressful (but productive) year.

And yet it was on summer vacation that my family went to Madison five years ago, and it was on summer vacation that, last night, I wrestled my network settings into letting me log into the Princeton network remotely so that I could search archive databases for a particular manuscript relevant to the enormous research project on which I am just beginning to embark, the one which I hope will someday become my senior thesis. The leads I found on the internet suggested that this manuscript was given to some library or another—maybe the Library of Congress, maybe the New York Public Library—but no one seems to know which library exactly. As I trawled through the most likely catalogs, marveling at my ability to use my own university’s library resources even though I’m gone till September, I was reminded of the crucial difference between college and academe. College is a four-year adventure, a transient state of packing one’s life up every few months and moving to a new dorm, a new internship in a new city, a new academic project. Semester by semester, your life changes: you grow older and wiser; your research projects get longer; your friends graduate; new friends matriculate. Life is constant change in college, as I found two weeks ago when I realized—to what should not have been my surprise—that packing up my life and vacating my old and beautiful sunlit room over the archway was normal.

But if college is impermanent, academe—in my life, anyway—is the state in which things will always be. Perhaps I am only reminded of this on Madison mornings which turn into afternoons in the Scribner Room, evenings in Rhode Island researching my thesis, or sleepless nights spent stressing about the job market. But academe was my life from the day I was born—and at some sudden moment maybe a year ago, when the air was hot and still like it was in Madison and one of my parents’ colleagues asked me what I thought I might major in and I said “history,” clearly and firmly, I embraced the world I grew up in for all it contains and all it is worth. Most children, I suppose, choose to reject their parents’ world and strike out into uncharted waters, and to them I wish all the best of luck. But as long as “uncharted waters” to me means a document lying undiscovered in an archive, a connection between texts never before made, a student’s mind not yet unlocked, or a degree not yet received or conferred, my permanent home is in ivory towers everywhere, more so than at college reunions or even than on the gay dancefloor.

I don’t yet know whether I’ll come back to Princeton for a reunion years hence, but I’m sure I would return to campus if I had black stripes on my sleeves from another institution, a tenure-track job, and a book on my CV; and if there were a conference in my field and I submitted a paper and wound up presenting it, sitting at last on the other side of the Dickinson 210 seminar table. It wouldn’t feel so much like a homecoming, back to “the best old place of all,” as like an extension of the same world which has always been and always will be my home, no matter which institution grants my degrees or gives me (I hope and pray) a job. For Princeton is not my home so much as academe is, and so I imagine that on a hot and humid summer day in a fantasy world years hence—when I’m working on my senior thesis, my dissertation, my first or my second book—I’ll feel the slightest stirrings of a breeze or see the cloudburst clouds gathering overhead, I’ll put down my book or cease typing for an instant, and I’ll think of summer in Madison.

The Queer Activist: A Brief Observation

Over at Princeton’s new queer-community blog, my colleague Ryan has written a great, thoughtful post about making a career in queer activism work:

I feel extremely conflicted towards the LGBT movement establishment and question whether I want to make a career out of LGBT advocacy.

Before coming to Princeton, I was Director of Louisiana’s statewide LGBT advocacy organization, the Forum For Equality. It was an amazing and challenging experience — as one might expect, there are a unique set of priorities and obstacles for the movement in the American South. I am incredibly proud of my work at the Forum, and it seems natural for me to return to this type of work upon graduation.

But when I think of returning to work for LGBT issues, I wonder what is motivating me. Is it a sense of guilt or obligation? Should smart young gay people who are interested in politics feel as if they “must” work for LGBT rights? The LGBT community is a small minority, and those with elite educations are an even smaller minority. Who am I to turn my back on the movement that has allowed me to be who I am?

Ryan continues, asking (very saliently, I think) whether the developing world would be a better use of his talents, and implicitly noting how exhausting political advocacy work can be. But he didn’t note something else I think is important, which is that there is more than one way to be an activist. Deciding against a career in LGBT advocacy and policy, or advocacy and policy at all, does not mean turning your back on queer issues and being an advocate for queer visibility, acceptance, and civil rights. I consider myself a queer activist through my work at learning to be a historian and an educator, because someday I intend to make a career out of telling the stories of queer lives long ended, out of developing critical frameworks through which to examine the sexualities and identities and cultural movements of the past, and out of passing all this information on to a new generation of young folks whose lives were changed by learning about Harvey Milk or Stonewall and who are ready to learn so much more. Long after marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are decided in America, all around the world we will have a need for people to tell stories like the ones I am learning to tell—and, if necessary, perhaps to tell their own stories of their own lives too. Staying well-informed enough and staying accessible enough that when someone has a question about queer issues you can take a half-hour to answer it is a form of activism. Being out is a form of activism. And if all these things weren’t true, I wouldn’t be able to reconcile the life I want to lead with the principles I believe in.

And teaching—about queer stuff or not—is the greatest way that there is to make the world you believe in and dream of for the next generation.

Addendum: I see that a lot of people are coming to this blog from a College Confidential thread about the atmosphere for LGBT students at Princeton. If you’re a prospective Princeton student seeking information about LGBT life on campus, please feel free to contact me, and I will absolutely answer any questions you have.