Low Thoughts on Higher Education

by lily grossbard, layout manager

Hi there,

In case you don’t know me, I’m Lily Grossbard, Blueshift’s Layout Manager. Our dear EIC Tyler asked me to write a blog post, but he’s living it up at college, and couldn’t tell me what to write about.

So here I am, sitting in the “Harry Potter library” at the University of Chicago, where I just started school. Trying to write a blog post. It’s 2 AM, the wind is howling, and I’m surrounded by piles of Marxist manuscripts, because that’s what we do here, read Marx (side-note: why do all complications of Marx and Marxist texts feature plain, text-covered covers in a beige-orange/red/black/white color-scheme?)

This is the reading room where people spend their lives. Literally: they bring blankets to sleep. It’s open all night, the academic-scholar-Marx-reader’s dream. The café outside has free coffee at midnight. They neglect to mention just how much you’ll appreciate that on the tour. The gothic ceiling arches a full four stories above and the three-story windows have infinite panes of glass in argyle patterns. I’m still waiting for Quirrell to announce “troll in the dungeon!”

What am I doing here? Not in the reading room – the answer’s too simple – it’s Marx, always Marx (sometimes Foucault though). What am I doing here at college? The things I know I’m passionate about, the things that I want to spend my life on – activism, graphic design, the outdoors, poetry, queerness – these aren’t things they teach in the stone halls or glass classrooms.

If I want to be president, or if I want to be a park ranger, proving that 1 ≠ 0 (yes, I did that the other day as a lemma for a proof) isn’t going to get me very far. It’s funny, that I of all people should be questioning the value of a liberal education. I who can’t decide what she wants to study, whose love of literature is rivaled only by her love of math, who so innocently wanted to go to college to learn.

I’m actually really stumped here. I have two goals in life. I want to be happy, and I want to make other people happy. I’m a generally happy person, and there are actually a lot of things that make me happy, but the activities that collectively make up the average student’s college experience aren’t really any of them. And making other people happy? Like making the world a better place? How am I going to do that from within the ivory (or more appropriately, gothic) tower?

I just have this intense urge to get-up-and-go-right-now, because Hegel and the proof of Intermediate Value Theorem are useful, but they aren’t the end-all-be-all. They’re fascinating, but they won’t change lives, or not in the immediate term, the way we need them to right now. Kant isn’t going to solve the budget crisis, and The Odyssey isn’t an answer to racial inequality.

I can easily refute these arguments with stronger counterarguments, and I know in my mind why I’m here, I have an answer for you, tested and ready. But in my gut – I’m still looking for an answer. I’m also still looking for a topic for this blog post, so if you have one, let me know…

#lilygrossbard #misc