You didn’t understand the point in that post.
It wasn’t saying a school is perfect. It was an argument about liability.
And the post explicitly stated that there were problems in the first sentence.
While I don’t disagree with this point in itself, it’s not really addressing what I was saying. My point was that when you’re poor, there are several signs that people can pick up on. A rich person dressing down is not going to be indistinguishable from this anyway.
I can’t speak for the author. In his case, I think he might benefit from counseling. Depression certainly tarnishes just about everything in life, even the wonderful things. But I don’t think it takes anything away from the central points he’s trying to make, which have big grains of truth to them. Just because your daughter didn’t encounter such things does not mean they don’t happen.
I must say, many of the comments vehemently disagreeing with the blog and shaming the author are extremely detached from present-day college environment. The writer clearly didn’t handle his experience well but he points out a lot of issues that plague rigorous colleges and have led many students to suicide. For all the parents reading this saying “My kid’s experience is nothing like this,” let me tell you, you probably have no idea what your kid is really going through at college, as much as you’d like to think you do and as often as he/she calls you.
Further, pointing out his use of Adderall/Percocet as a strike against him is comical. These drugs are nothing short of commonplace on elite college campuses.
1 Like
What points are those exactly?
- Competition exists?
- Some people are shallow?
- Some people like to talk about God when smoking pot?
This is just a bunch of “anecdata” that would be silly to extrapolate from.
I fail to see what’s problematic about restating the law when someone makes the false suggestion that a institution of higher learning “owns” (that’s the meaning of the possessive, after all) the misery that some messed up drug abusers unconsciously inflict on another student who apparently expected to encounter model citizens, uniformly, in the Ivy League. Newsflash: It is not Columbia’s responsibility to eliminate malcontents and poor role models (here I’m taking Zach’s word for granted, by the way) from their campuses. There is no implied or explicit contract, and even Zach did not imply that. You did, when you said,
Apparently it’s not a “problem” from the school’s perspective. And they bear no legal or moral responsibility to prevent students from having bad social experiences or unhappy encounters with reality.
Isn’t Columbia the university with “mattress girl”?
I’ll say it again, and you can call me and my daughter liars as often as you rudely wish to, but your divinely magical insight does not alter the reality of personal experience. Maybe she got amazingly lucky, or maybe Like does really attract Like. She never had those experiences. That’s not the same thing as claiming (she wouldn’t; I wouldn’t) that for an absolute fact everyone on campus was perfectly adjusted. She had 4 lovely years without encountering such individuals. Maybe it was her major, her residential college, her personality. Or, wait for this: Maybe it was her personal choices :-?
Deal with it, and try to cope with that fact.
Columbia offered the wrong student admission. The student accepted the wrong offer of admission. End of story, IMO.
I’m tempted to suggest that the student might have been much happier at a CTCL school, but I have no doubt that none was prestigious enough. Plenty has been written about stress at the elites, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Not shaming him. Just saying there is a reason why so many knowledgable people say that “fit” is extremely important in choosing a college.
It’s reassuring to see how many have Life figured out…and are at the ready to offer a serious and heartfelt scolding.
The article, in my view, isn’t about Columbia. And of course the suicide isn’t on Columbia. Have some of you read the Overachievers? Pointing out that the pursuit of college admissions is not only ultra competitive but entails certain things for many to access them doesn’t mean the schools aren’t attractive. Of course they are attractive! That’s part of why so many high achievers (and their families) get caught up in the arms race. Lamenting that, or pointing out that there are consequences, or wishing things worked a little differently, don’t mean that we stop wanting something, or that we don’t in the end accept whatever is part of the deal in the pursuit (and in the living it once there). As a parent of kids at “almost elite” schools, I don’t begrudge the kids who go to the elite ones, and I would gladly send one of my kids to Columbia in a heartbeat (even while resonating with a good portion of the article).
Apparently I should have added an adjective for the literally minded: Neither Columbia nor any other Institution of Higher Learning bears any legal responsibility for protecting students from all bad social experiences or unhappy encounters with reality. “Social experiences” and “encounters with reality” do not necessarily include crimes or alleged crimes. It’s a broader category.
I didn’t say anything about bodily threats, attempted or succeeded.
Rape and attempted rape, both date-rape and stranger rape, is an unfortunate danger on most any college campus, not “more so” in the Ivy League. Check out UC Berkeley and many, many other public universities.
Did the kid say Columbia is too stressful, for him? If so, I missed that. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to hear that he is doing quite well and also “fitting in” quite well. In short, he’s acting like a smart, aware, perceptive, quick on his feet, and yes, somewhat sarcastic and cynical intellectual college student. Not very surprising.
Look, just because he wrote the article doesn’t mean a) he speaks authoritatively or b) that he’s at-risk. (Or c: a bad fit. After all, it is NYC.) A few of us suspect he wrote it with the hyperbole in mind, the edginess, thinking he is some sort of artiste, privileged to proclaim. Try looking at it through other lenses. For all we know, most of it could have been invented. The article may very well be a form of performance art. Or the old sophomoric, “I think it, so it must be said.”
We all know kids who do attention getting things, wear their proverbial underwear on their heads and try to pass it off as significant.
As for this silly notion that there can only be two extremes (kids satisfied and kids not,) there is a vast middle ground.
Go back and read the earlier links which give additional insight to Zach.
"I must say, many of the comments vehemently disagreeing with the blog and shaming the author are extremely detached from present-day college environment. "
Yes, that’s right. For example, I, the parent of two college seniors, know practically nothing about their lives.
@finalchild. I, for one, don’t have life figured out and am not offering a scolding. But people shouldn’t write articles, expecting people not to respond. And while suggesting to prospective students that they do their due diligence may seem like stating the obvious, the writer either did not get it, or made an awful mistake. For many people college is among the best 4 years of their lives. It’s sad for this student that it is not the case for him, but things could have been different.
@MidwestDad3, understood. But how do we know that the kid isn’t having the best 4 years of his life??? How do we know that he isn’t wildly happy? Some may have joked about my reference to the existentialists, but from my memory, students who really go into that stuff could be loving the heck out of their schools and also be writing deep, dark, and even cynical essays. What about students who are engaged in Feminist and African-American studies who write very intense essays and/or are very outspoken about societal ills? Do we presume that all of them are unhappy too, or need therapy? Maybe some think the essay is bad, but some of the reactions seem quite personalized.
I also think there’s some issue with the semantics of terms like “the norm” or “commonplace.” What are people’s thresholds for terms like “common” or “frequent” or “many”?
For example, look at these numbers from Brown University polling:
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2011/04/06/to-get-an-edge-students-turn-to-illicit-study-drug-use/
So we’re talking about 1/8 students reporting abusing prescription drugs (for any purpose) during their time at Brown. That means 7/8 students not abusing prescription drugs (for any purpose) during their time at Brown.
Or if you want a more recent poll:
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/04/17/white-older-students-more-likely-to-use-substances/
So 94-96% of Brown students did not consume any drugs (outside of alcohol and marijuana) in the past year.
Now I’ll admit that the question sounds like people who use adderall might have said no in the more recent poll, but taking the older number that was more specific to prescription drug abuse and bumping it up to 20% (no basis for doing that). What does it mean when 4/5 students aren’t doing something? Is it commonplace? Is it rampant? Does it mean anything when one student says “everyone I know uses adderall” but a whole bunch of students say “I don’t know anyone who uses adderall”?
@epiphany, I was actually thinking as much of the accused rapist as the alleged victim. The accused is suing Columbia for being “a silent bystander and then turn(ing) into an active supporter of a fellow student’s harassment campaign by institutionalizing it and heralding it.”
My point was just that it’s not necessarily as cut and dry as you suggested.
I’m sorry. I missed most of that. I didn’t see smart, I didn’t see aware or perceptive, I didn’t see quick on his feet at all. Sarcastic and cynical, of course. Intellectual? A gigantic “No” to that. The opposite of intellectual. Visceral, mainly, with absolutely no respect for the value of learning in an academic community, except for the cash-in value the diploma he will eventually get may have. (I’m responding here more to the second of his articles linked, not the first. The one where he said he doesn’t listen to his professors anymore because he feels like they are trying to control him, and he’s just doing his time to get his degree so he can go out in the world and hustle like the people he really respects.) And self-centered as anything. The point of the world is to please him; when he finds himself displeased, it’s someone’s fault.
It’s OK to be anti-intellectual, but I really can’t forgive him for taking up space at Columbia with that attitude. Also for the sneering contempt he has for any classmates that don’t meet his (suburban, affluent) standards of cool. Heaven forbid they should fail at drug etiquette, or care too much about what they are studying, or want desperately to achieve some form of success he considers hollow or beneath him!
I’m sure there are elements of truth about Columbia or Elite Universities In General in the articles, but what I saw mostly there is a self-portrait of an anti-intellectual fraud who projects his own juvenile anxieties on the world around him and sees his flaws and fears reflected everywhere. And then figures that’s why he’s unhappy.
I may not know exactly how much Adderall or Percocet my kids consumed in college, but I met plenty of that type back in the day, when they were probably about as plentiful as they are now. I didn’t like them then, didn’t care what they thought, and I still don’t.
@finalchild He writes it as a cautionary tale, and it isn’t clear that it is actually too stressful for him. He says he couldn’t have imagined the “wealth, privilege, cruelty, pressure, and stress.” (3rd paragraph) He has a section titled “The Pressure is Intense.” But you are correct, there doesn’t seem to be an indication that he is not handling it.
He seems far from happy, though. “So many awful things happen here,” he says. He wonders if he would have been happier at OSU. His most rewarding times are spent off campus, such as 20 hours at the strip club.
THIS:
But even more, THIS:
I think those he chose to hang out with and verbally eviscerate were intolerable mirrors, worthy of discrediting.