I try not to think about my education, interests, and concerns in terms such as "usefulness" and "reputation." This is not, as you might suspect, because I am a Medieval and Renaissance history concentrator and thus am not being usefully educated, nor is it because I am an economics concentrator and so lack reputable interests. It is because I am not comfortable with the assumptions that the terms seem to hold. If I conceive of the purpose of my life as finding ways to be useful to others, I am complacently assuming that working with people who have been less socio-economically privileged than I entails a relationship in which I help them at my expense and they give nothing to me. On the contrary, through coordinating the AIDS Oral History Project at the Swearer Center this year, and through creating the Language Empowerment Program for homeless people with HIV/AIDS last year, I have found that no distinction exists between helping others and helping oneself�that, in fact, the two are inextricably related, for reasons too numerous to go into here.
Moreover, if the purpose of my life is merely to attain reputation, then I am the sort of person who participates in community service to pad my resume and who is applying to a class with the title "Presidential Seminar" because of the word presidential and because of the fact that it involves a selective process in the first place. I am not meaning to sound cynical�I do not consider myself to be a cynical person�but I am trying to be honest, and I want to make my perspective and my reason for applying for the seminar clear.
I am applying for the seminar because the issues it seeks to examine are immensely relevant to me at this point in my life, and possibly will be for the rest of it. As a person who might well spend his days as an intellectual, safely cloistered in a library with dusty Latin texts, I have a need to figure out what my civic responsibilities and obligations are and would be. I believe that intellectuals have the potential to change the world, that the fact that students within and sometimes even guided by universities have led many of the revolutions and protests in history is not without meaning. But I also believe that many intellectuals choose their professions because they either disdain the "real world," or because they fear it. I also think that, more disturbingly, the academy can encourage and justify ceaseless dialogue and research and the resultant failure to act or make tangible changes. Moreover, as a person who might live his life as an activist�the sort of person who wears clogs and has a subscription to The Nation�I want to study the intersection between scholarly and social pursuits. I am interested in taking this course because it seems like a unique opportunity for me to hash out my thoughts on these issues in greater depth, as well as to learn about and be challenged by others� thoughts on them.
But let me turn to the second part of the question: my thoughts on the notion that college graduates should live their lives as examples for the unanointed masses. My cynical side�of which you already have seen enough�would point out that college graduates are the people who hold power, and powerful people rarely are as wonderful as Jones suggests or as Brown�s Statement requires. Therefore, colleges could not possibly be morally educating their students in the manner that they intend or are expected to. I understand where America�s deep-seeded belief that people with college degrees are better than those who lack them comes from; over break I read Gordon Wood�s Radicalism of the American Revolution, in which Wood describes how Princeton and Harvard grads and their ability to quote long passages from Homer in Greek earned them the reverence of eighteenth-century society, and he hints at the fact that this tradition has become engrained in our culture.
But I am not convinced that it is more than a cultural phenomenon. That is, I am not sure that the long hours that I have spent studying Latin in any way qualify me as a moral exemplar for people who have spent the same amount of time flipping burgers. However, even if I have my doubts about the capacity of education to instill virtue, I do believe that the experience of attending a university can broaden one�s horizon in a way that "promotes intellectual, moral, and aesthetic growth." Having the leisure time to hang out with friends at 3 am and chat about Big Questions and being told by articulate professors and by American culture in general that you are America�s future can profoundly empower an individual, perhaps even contribute to her or his moral development. There is no denying that the university experience is a powerful one.