<p>This may sound like heresy, but I've had a feeling in the back of my head that Swarthmore really isn't all that intellectual. I was wondering if anyone could comment on that. Most conversations are definitely casual. Intellectual conversations that I've had occur in class and sometimes in campus organizations, but that's about it. One of my friends went so far as to call Swarthmore a "land of pseudo-intellectuals." In other words, the students really aren't intellectual at all. I have seen this in my roommate last year, a graduate from a prestigious private school.</p>
<p>He tried to argue that I wasn't a very good friend to him, on the basis of a few incidents. For example, I kept locking the door when he was in the shower (because I don't want people coming in when there's nobody in the room) and I did not promise to wake him up for his chemistry midterm in case he slept through his alarm (because he has a habit of being late, that he has to change, and maybe it takes failing the midterm to do that, and because I kind of think that if you sleep through the midterm, you kind of deserve to fail). Then he obnoxiously asked me to define what a friend was, attempting to correct me, and told me that I was amoral ("You could get an A in an ethics class without getting the lesson."), and then went so far as to say that I was basically inhuman, a claim that capped the climax of confusion and ignorance.</p>
<p>I brushed off his comments with sarcasm. Then he uttered quotes from Confucius, in an attempt to sound philosophical but ended up showing pretense.</p>
<p>There are clearly problems with what he said. It was so full of nonsense that I didn't know where to begin. First his accusations of my being "unfriendly," without him actually listening to my side of the story. Then equating being amoral and unfriendly with being inhuman. All doing this while maintaining a tone of superiority and condescension. But it is all hokum, pretentious nonsense, an attempt to be intellectual but really an enemy of true intellect. I really can't believe he got into Swarthmore.</p>
<p>I don't want to sound as if I am basing my whole questioning of Swarthmore's intellectual life on just this one incident. There have not been many times when I had a genuine conversation that employed intellect (that is, intelligence used in learning). I was wondering if anyone else felt that way. I could be completely wrong.</p>
<p>I’m not sure I understnad the example given; are you saying, this is a “typical” Swarthmore conversation, or are you saying, it was exceptional somehow (in terms of its recourse to intellectual concepts?)</p>
<p>I hope it doesn’t become a typical Swarthmore conversation. It’s an example of what my friend might have called a pseudo-intellectual conversation. There’s no intellect in it, but I think my roommate thought himself to be intellectual. That’s why I’m wondering whether Swarthmore students really are intellectual, or do they just pretend to be so.</p>
<p>I don’t find your reasons for not waking up your roommate very compelling. It doesn’t seem your half of the conversation was that “intellectual.” </p>
<p>I have tremendous respect for those I’ve met from Swat. And I doubt you could find a more intellectual campus.</p>
<p>The truth is, there are very few true intellectuals, and a good thing too, because society needs movers, shakers, dreamers, artists, social folk, researchers too. The involvement with abstract ideas is just one part of intelligence.</p>
<p>I am sorry you’ve been disappointed in your experience so far, and I sincerely hope it improves.</p>
<p>A generous heart will go a long way toward perfecting any environment.</p>
<p>To me, Swat is beautiful, progressive, thoughtful, intellectual, but certainly not perfect. But for most students I think it’s more than enough.</p>
<p>My half of the conversation certainly wasn’t intellectual. The entire conversation was not intellectual. My point was that my roommate was full of pretentious nonsense but considers himself to be intellectual.</p>
<p>I am not saying that I’ve found my first year completely disappointing. I think my professors have generally been very good teachers, and I love the personal attention that you get in classes. I think I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve met some wonderful friends. There are people whom I dislike, but that’s to be expected everywhere.</p>
<p>My real concern is that everybody says that Swarthmore is intellectual. I mean, everybody. But after a year here, I can’t say that I’ve had many intellectual conversations outside of class. I don’t think I’m preventing myself from seeking what I am looking for. So I am a bit puzzled. Everyone says Swarthmore is intellectual, but where are those conversations and discussions to be found? Or are they not there, and are people claiming to be intellectual when really being pseudo-intellectual?</p>
<p>I was sitting in the Parrish lounge two hours waiting for my kid to finish interview.
It was their alumni weekend. From the class of ’39 grandma to summer job kids, conversations are lively and spoken with full sentences without any “like,” “whatever” “ OMG!” “totally”
I thought, like, OMG! This must be totally one of the most intellectual place in the world maybe except Deep Springs or whatever.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Swarthmore does have a lot of pseudo-intellectuals; the average intelligence of the student body at Swarthmore is undoubtedly lower than at some prestigious universities (and some private high schools, or even competitive public high schools, for that matter). The students are high-caliber, to be sure, but not the absolute best of the best across the boards.</p></li>
<li><p>You could probably be a better friend to your roommate. If it wasn’t going to inconvenience me at all, I’d definitely have helped him get up on time for his Chemistry midterm.</p></li>
<li><p>One could say that some of his arguments are pseudo-intellectual, thereby leading some credence to his claim that there are pseudo-intellectuals at Swarthmore.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Intellectualism aside, I can’t believe anyone would argue that it’s fine to lock a room (repeatedly!) knowing that your roommate is in the shower without a key.
It also is not your job to teach your roommate a lesson by letting him miss a midterm.</p>
<p>dchow08 - chill out. Your attention to the presence of intellectuals on Swarthmore’s campus is misguided. Instead of looking for intellectual conversations wherever you go, you should consider the quality of conversations you have with peers in class and in campus organizations. Hopefully, the quality will be pretty high. Although we’d all like to believe we’re today’s renaissance men and women, the truth is we don’t know everything about everything, and the ‘intellectual’ conversation you’d like to have with an acquaintance walking down to Sharples might not be the conversation for which he/she is looking.</p>
<p>Furthermore, your interest in ‘intellectual’ conversations seems superficial. You say,
Really??! </p>
<p>If that’s really the way you feel, and regardless of A.E.'s statement on the average intelligence of students being lower at Swat, then I recommend you take a look at learning in terms of self-interest. You know your interests better than anyone, and if you’re as hardcore as you say you are, then there will be few students as well read as you in the areas that interest you. In that sense, you’re unlikely to gain much from conversations with peers. Although peers might have a different ‘mental bookshelf’ from which to draw for analysis, the time it takes them to come to conclusions that interest you will probably be more costly than for you to use that time to read things that most interest you, even if that means less social time. </p>
<p>But I agree with the other posters: your various demands of your roommate seem unreasonable.</p>
<p>OK, about the locking my roommate out during the shower: I didn’t know he was taking a shower. I usually lock the room and leave, and sometimes it turns out that he was in the shower or he was elsewhere in the dorm without his key. And about the chemistry test: I would probably have woken him up if indeed he had slept through his alarm, but I told him that I would not promise to. With that said, we might just have to agree to disagree. I would not say that I demanded a whole lot from him. It was more that I asked him not to demand so much from me.</p>
<p>But fhimas, I don’t think two people need to have a shared “mental bookshelf” in order to have an intellectual conversation. But there has to be some connection. Take my Modern China class. People never talk about the readings outside of class. When they do, it’s, “Professor Li assigns so much work!” or “I have to read all this on top of a bio lab!” Nothing about ideas. Nobody instigates such an exchange of ideas. They’re not going to be profound ideas, but they’ll at least be something. </p>
<p>And you do not have to be in the same class as another person to have some conversation that uses intellect. Last night I was reading “The Power of Positive Thinking,” and I came across a chapter that said that to be happy, expect less and make do with what you have. That was interesting, because on my SAT essay I argued that it was better to have high expectations than low ones, and I wondered for a while whether it truly was a good thing if everyone were happy. Because if everyone were happy, then they’d expect less, but there have been times when expecting more is better. Everyone probably has some idea about that.</p>
<p>True, not everyone at Sharples is wanting to have intellectual conversation. But I’m sure there are some. I would say that I know at least one person who is intellectual, and he is a very good friend. Sometimes I’d be in his room and he’d ask, “I have an idea. Can’t color be a dimension?” For some reason, he thinks that anything that can be measured is automatically a dimension, but at least it was an idea. Or, “I found this passage from Plato really interesting. Let me read it to you.”</p>
<p>Everyone says that Swarthmore’s an intellectual school. My rather simple question is, “Where is intellect to be found, outside of the classroom?”</p>
<p>dchow, isn’t it hypocritical of you to be teaching some of these so-called lessons to your roommate when you haven’t learned them yourself? Maybe the RAs in your dorm last year should have let you sweat it a little more on the multiple occasions you came to them because you’d misplaced your key. Help a fellow Swattie out!</p>
<p>OK, I think people are starting to stray from the original topic. I don’t want to go into a long explanation, but I guess I have to.</p>
<p>BananaBread: I think that there is some confusion here. Let me say that I have reread the original post and regret having said, “I kept locking the door when he was in the shower,” because that sounds like I had the evil intention to lock the door, knowing that he was taking a shower. Let me clarify.</p>
<p>First, I never intended to give my roommate “a lesson.” </p>
<p>Second, yes, I have lost my key and needed help from an RA. I have been locked out several times, and my roommate has accidentally locked me out of the shower too. It’s not his fault. So I make an effort to bring my key with me at all times, just in case. Nobody likes to be locked out, but it happens to everyone. My point is not that I want to lock my roommate out to “teach him a lesson,” which may be what you were thinking when you said, “Help a fellow Swattie out!” What I’m saying is that I don’t always know where my roommate is, and I lock my room when there’s nobody there. So, after having been locked out several times, I suggested, “Why don’t you bring your key with you, so that if I lock the door, you won’t get locked out?” I don’t see anything hypocritical or unreasonable about that.</p>
<p>But I think we’re straying too far. First, this is the Swarthmore forum. Posts really should be about Swarthmore. Second, the reason I brought up my roommate is to give an example of how my roommate is pseudo-intellectual but thinks he is intellectual. With that said, I’d like to refrain from any more comments about locking my roommate out and focus on the question at hand, which is, “Where is intellect at Swarthmore to be found outside the classroom?”</p>
<p>Some of the most intellectual people I have met in my twenty plus years in the academic world have been low key and unpretentious, not prone to engage others in “intellectual” conversations. These people satisfy their thirst for knowledge by themselves and have not felt compelled to impart their “knowledge” outside of their classroom unless specifically asked. - - Swarthmore has a reputation for intellectualism because its students tend to be curious seekers of knowledge, much like my “intellectual” friends in academia.</p>
<p>With respect to pseudo-intellectuals, of course they can be found at Swarthmore. They can be found in every University campus, including Harvard and Oxford. But just because you may come across some of those, it does not mean that the majority of the students are “pseudos,” just as the lack of “intellectual” conversations that you have described, is not synonymous with students being devoid of intellect.</p>
<p>Thank you, dramatica. Yes, I do think that most students here are curious and do like to learn for the sake of learning. That’s one thing I love about Swarthmore. You can say that people here are intellectual in the sense of people who apply intelligence to their learning, which is what I think intellect is. It’s just that when I read about Swarthmore, I envisaged that people here would be chatting about what they’ve learned, outside of the classroom. You know, those late night conversations about the economy or whatever. Sharing ideas, like my friend. </p>
<p>Do you think that there is a “life of the mind” here when everyone individually is learning for the sake of learning, but keeping it to themselves instead of sharing it? By that I don’t mean telling everyone every fact they learned, but sharing their insights in their Practical Wisdom class, for example. To me, the intellectual life (the one I envisage) involves students eager to share ideas, and creating conversation about them. The complete opposite of, as you say, satisfying “their thirst for knowledge by themselves and [not feeling compelled] to impart their ‘knowledge’ outside of their classroom unless specifically asked.”</p>
<p>Honestly, and I hope I don’t come across as hostile in asking this, but what to you is “pseudo-intellectual?” I hear the term used a lot, and I think it’s a little pretentious (and I mean no offense to you in saying this, I promise) to delineate between what one thinks as “intellectual” or “pseudo-intellectual.” If you want to write everyone off in the latter, I suppose that’s your prerogative, but who really knows?</p>
<p>I have a couple of observations. One is that anybody who expects an intellectual discussion when the topic is who’s being the more inconsiderate roommate needs to adjust his or her expectations. A lot. </p>
<p>Another observation is this: Lots of kids who don’t have a great time in high school attribute some of the problem to the available peer group. For example, a kid who’s really into medieval music and wants to sing madrigals is stuck at a medium-sized public high school where neither the show-tunes-happy choral music director nor the Sousa-nut instrumental director can meet his needs, and none of the other kids are interested. Or, say, a swimmer goes to a school that just can’t field a full swim team, and there’s no decent club team she can reasonably get herself to. Or a kid really wants to have deep discussions, but everybody else’s conversations are all ANTM all the time. (Just to pick three oversimplified examples.)</p>
<p>Often, kids like this are told that they’ll find lots more like-minded peers, and be happier, in college. And when the problem really is that the kid hasn’t ever met enough people who shared her or his interests, then often college does turn out to be kind of a wonderland. There’s an early-music group; there’s a swim team; there are great, wide-ranging conversations.</p>
<p>But sometimes the problem is more complex. In some cases, to a greater or lesser degree, the problem is much more about the fact that the kid doesn’t actually relate well to people – she or he doesn’t know how to get beyond the surface (and discover that there’s more to other people than she thought), or puts people off with odd questions, or expects other people who like madrigals to do nothing but sing them all day long. She or he is likely to be disappointed – and sometimes to blame the college. </p>
<p>So, dchow, as an adult who’s watched plenty of kids bump up against various situations that didn’t match their expectations, I’m offering this thought not to be unkind but in the hope that it might help you: If you’re not having
you might give some thought to whether the problem is “pseudo-intellectuals” and students “keeping it to themselves instead of sharing it” - or whether it isn’t possible that it has something to do with the way you approach and relate to your peers.</p>
<p>I’ve enjoyed the contributions people are making to this thread. Here’s mine. My daughter just finished her freshman year at Swat. She loved being with so many smart kids who she had so much fun with. Some of that fun had to do with having “smart” conversations (something that’s certainly important to her). But it was equally important to her that she could have plain old-fashioned fun (lots of laughs, wittiness and goofing around) with so many smart kids. This was a wonderful mix in her first year away from home and she’s happily looking forward to more of the same when she goes back in the fall. On a different note, I also think that as kids settle in their majors that they will have more conversations outside of class about “ideas” associated with their areas of interest.</p>
<p>It sounds as if DChow’s disillusion with Swarthmore & personal disappointment might come from mixing together analytical & critical. Here contributors have noted that the tone of the posts have come across as critical, bordering on judgmental. DC seems to be looking for conversations that could be described as analytical, yet finds many students criticizing the demands of their work. Similarly, DC is critical of her/his roommate.</p>
<p>My point is that when feeling frustrated it’s easier to be critical than analytical in one’s thinking & approach. I also think that HMW’s comment (@18) is very thoughtful & wise words for many, even those older than adolescence or young adulthood.</p>