Stephen Krewson | What's the point of college?

On Tuesday, President Amy Gutmann and her husband donated $100,000 to fund undergraduate research. Surely this is more than a gesture in these troubled times, when even Harvard president Drew Faust issues ominous warnings that her school may "absorb unprecedented endowment losses" (30 percent!).

Misery loves company and the tribulations of others are balm for the still-open wound of Penn's 3.9-percent endowment decrease. Neither schadenfraude nor generosity, however, can offer much help with the question that seems, shark-like, to raise its fin whenever the financial waters turn red.

What's the use of college?

In a time of foreclosed homes and massive layoffs, what can possibly justify spending tens of thousands of dollars on the study of ideas? For someone, such as myself, who receives heavy subsidies to engage in this study, it's perhaps narcissistic to even ask the question.

Oh well.

When the days grow cold, the classroom becomes more desirable - if only for its warmth. I recently sat in two of these climate-controlled refuges, listening to a pair of guest speakers.

The first speaker - the vice president of slot operations at Harrah's - detailed the quantitative underpinnings of the sin industry and showed colorful charts demonstrating the fruits of exploitation. What better way, I thought, to prove the use of college.

Gaming is an apt metaphor for life. In the long run you know you're going to lose, but you play anyway. Why? Because it's fun. College, too, is fun and gets you into the great career crapshoot. A career brings money to purchase more fun.

But that can't be the point, can it?

Later, I attended an English departmental lecture (for extra credit). The professor analyzed an obscure 18th-century novel. Her aim was to show how the insertion of a pet monkey into one of the concluding scenes constituted an attack on period ideas about the desirability of marriage and problematized the structures of male/female and human/animal intimacy. Heady stuff.

I could scarcely suppress my glee at the fact that I could - after two and a half years at Penn - more or less understand the code she spoke in. This certainly must be the real, ivy-clad essence of education: the ability to wear turtlenecks, speak in paragraphs of dense prose and analyze a text six ways to Sunday while never arriving at a definitive reading.

But this is nothing more than mastering a specific skill - no different than programming a computer or riding a bike. As Stanley Fish argues, the humanities will not "save" us or make us better people. For that matter, neither will anything else taught at Penn (though, to be fair, many things taught here will help save others).

Franklin spoke poorly when he spoke about the "practical." The practical is distinct from the academic. W. H. Auden famously wrote, "Poetry makes nothing happen." How much less, sitting and talking about poetry. Or sitting and talking about business. Or sitting and talking in general!

Of course, I'm being glib. The things you learn are of use. To quote Drew Faust at a happier time: "A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime."

Even this concept of learning seems too constrained. It's a mistake to think that the only justification for pursuing knowledge is what it will allow you to do in the future. As philosopher Robert Nozick put it:

"When I was 15 years old or 16 I carried around in the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful. How much I wanted an older person to notice me carrying it and be impressed, to pat me on the shoulder and say . I don't know what exactly."

College, for me, has been that pat on the shoulder. It's an initiation into the realm of ideas. But it is more than merely ideas or the application of ideas to other ends. It defies objective valuation. It is perhaps indulgent, perhaps enlightening. Maybe it is, to use a phrase from Kant, an emergence from self-imposed immaturity.

But an emergence into what? That's for you to decide.

Stephen Krewson is a College junior from Schenectady, N.Y. His e-mail is krewson@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Me Speech Zone appears alternating Thursdays.

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