<p>This will be my last post on this thread which seems to be going nowhere. Dchow, glad you found some helpful comments here among the ■■■■■■■■, sarcasm, off-topic posts, and cyberbullying.</p>
<p>Duhvinci, I am clearly aware you are an independent thinker by your refusal to use conventional capitalization rules. :rolleyes:</p>
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<p>Wow, what a terrible argument. I’ll counter it with something equally terrible:</p>
<p>One is an Ivy, one is Swarthmore; can YOU tell them apart?</p>
<p>SAT Critical Reading Middle 50%: 680/760
SAT Math Middle 50%: 670/760
SAT Writing Middle 50%: 660/760</p>
<p>SAT Critical Reading Middle 50%: 690/790
SAT Math Middle 50%: 700/790
SAT Writing: 690/780</p>
<p>If I were a gambling man, I’d gladly bet you that the students going to the school to whom the second set of scores belongs are, on average, smarter. That said, whether they would meet dchow’s strict qualifications for being intellectuals as opposed to pseudo-intellectuals is another matter.</p>
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<p>It’s good that you’re broadening your horizons a little by hanging out with the stoners. Take it to the next level, and maybe you’ll find yourself in a lot more intellectual conversations, or at least that’s what you’ll think.</p>
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<p>I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like you’re being very proactive.</p>
<p>OK, to respond to my own question: </p>
<p>I’ve thought about it a bit, and now I think it’s a lot harder than I thought to have the genuinely intellectual conversations I described. I think that those people were right who pointed out that it would be easier to have those conversations once I’m in honors seminars (I plan to do math honors major and history honors minor.). The reason is that it’s hard to say anything really substantive when you just have an intro-level background. For example, it’s hard to have genuinely philosophical discussions when all your knowledge of philosophy stems from an intro course. I did engage in some philosophical conversations with people in my dorm, but their ideas seemed to be superficial–they clearly didn’t know enough philosophy to back up their ideas strongly. In other words, they were very ignorant.</p>
<p>And there’s not much you can say about history readings from an intro course in Chinese history, because you have to have a deeper understanding in order to say anything really worth saying, beyond general impressions. </p>
<p>I think that intellectual conversation does exist at Swarthmore, but it’s in large part confined to discussion about politics, because that’s something that a large group of Swatties know about. It just makes more sense to have better, more genuine intellectual discussion when you’ve declared a major and are taking honors seminars.</p>
<p>dchow08–I’m sorry that your first year at Swarthmore has been a bit disappointing, but I do think things will improve in the future. As you move along into honors seminars, you’ll find plenty of good discussion, but it won’t always spill out of the classroom, because people do need an escape valve!<br>
I can’t really speak to what it’s like day to day at Swarthmore, but my D, an 09 grad, is really the most intellectual person I’ve ever met–YET, she doesn’t sit around having those types of discussions with her friends all the time. They have lots of esoteric interests, and knowledge–conversation could be about anything! Still,it would be very hard to confuse them with most other groups of college students I see around and listen to.
I think my D would agree that the best way to appreciate Swarthmore is to spend a little time away from it—spending time with other college students in jobs, internships and study abroad gave her a deep appreciation for her fellow Swarthmore students!</p>
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<p>I couldn’t disagree more.</p>
<p>“I did engage in some philosophical conversations with people in my dorm, but their ideas seemed to be superficial–they clearly didn’t know enough philosophy to back up their ideas strongly. In other words, they were very ignorant.”</p>
<p>how obnoxious.</p>
<p>A.E.–I’m actually glad to hear you say that! To be honest, as soon as I wrote that first post, I realized that it was much too strong a statement—just as often, she’s happy to be out of the bubble.</p>
<p>yea, dchow, when I first read your original post I had no idea you were equating casual intellectual conversation with graduate level grasp of a particular topic. I always thought that part of the fun of casual, “superficial” bull-sessions was not in proving how much you knew but in exploring how much knowledge you actually had in common with the people around you (most of whom are studying very different things, anyway.) I know people who seem to make it their goal to prove they’re the smartest person in every room they enter. Those people, IMHO, are boring. I’m not saying you are like those people; but, you do seem to be setting the bar pretty high.</p>
<p>Yes, and on reflection, the “bar” I set is probably unreasonably high. I mean, Swarthmore students are college students, and a few years ago all these students were in high school. I’ve thought about it, and I realize that the Swarthmore student body mostly consists of students who did well in high school and enjoy learning. I think that the intellectual conversations I describe can be had at Swarthmore with other students, but the students who would be having these conversations would be discussing the fields they majored in. For example, last year I became friends with an economics honors major who knew so much about economics–it was very fun to talk to him. He was not “making it their goal to prove they’re the smartest person in every room they enter”–he and I were genuinely interested in the exchange of ideas.</p>
<p>So I most emphatically do not have in mind students meeting together and sharing everything they know, trying to make themselves seem more knowledgeable than everyone else. I find those people obnoxious; who wouldn’t? What I meant by intellectual conversation was sharing ideas that others would find interesting. For example, finding an article in the newspaper that had to do with cultural identity that related to one’s English class, and sharing that article with other people in the class and talking about it. Nonetheless, doing this and having meaningful intellectual conversation–I still think making witty, “intellectual” side remarks is not intellectual at all but is rather pseudo-intellectual–is difficult. People at Swarthmore may have less of a common standard of knowledge than I thought.</p>
<p>And people should not just be talking facts. The walking encyclopedia–there is no greater bore on God’s earth. There has to be real substance, which turns a fact into knowledge. Otherwise the “intellectual” discussion–“That joke reminds me of Freud!”–is just mumbo jumbo.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, I thought my high expectations would be fulfilled on hearing how “intellectual” the student body is supposed to be. I think it is to an extent–students generally know quite a bit about politics. I know this is unrealistic, but… if only everyone on campus knew about Marx, Shaw, Bagehot, William James, Montaigne, and Shakespeare…</p>
<p>Frankly, dchow, I think it’s kind of rude to assume that others who don’t discuss things in the manner of ‘intellectual’ that you would like are ignorant or implicitly below you. Explore a little! 
There are varying degrees of intellectual, and some can certainly be found in grand discussions and sharing of ideas, but I think ‘intellectual’ is so subjective a term that it can be found in humorous or serious conversations. That’s what I’ve definitely found from my year at Swat.</p>
<p>I have never said that those who don’t discuss things intellectually are below me! Nor do I think that people who don’t discuss things intellectually are therefore ignorant. I have never said such things, bubblysoprano.</p>
<p>Ignorant, by definition, means lacking knowledge, so I think it’s perfectly fine to say that there are people who are ignorant when it comes to knowing philosophy. Would you find it rude if I used the word “uninformed” instead? To me, when I said that someone was ignorant/uninformed, I did not mean it as a judgment; I meant it as a fact.</p>
<p>What do you mean by varying degrees of intellectual? Isn’t there just one definition? I think of “intellectual” as an objective word with a set meaning. How do you see it?</p>
<p>dchow08 – have you ever heard of something called a marijuana cigarette? You and your friends should check this out. I’ve heard this particular substance stimulates all sorts of conversations, intellectual and otherwise. Some people have even remarked on its mind-expanding qualities. Sounds like this ganja is just what you need to improve your Swarthmore experience.</p>
<p>My friends have definitely heard of it and have checked it out. I can’t believe you’re encouraging me to smoke marijuana. :)</p>
<p>By the way, bubblysoprano, I think the way you defined “ignorant” is different from the way I defined it. By ignorant, I didn’t mean generally unknowledgeable, as you may have. So when I said that those people who talked about philosophy at a superficial level, who really didn’t know much about philosophy were being “ignorant,” I did not mean that they just don’t really know anything; I meant that they don’t really know much about philosophy. That is why I said that when I said that someone was being ignorant, it was a fact, not a judgment (as in, oh, that guy is so ignorant about everything). Just wanted to clear that up.</p>
<p>“Marijuana as a Variety of Religious Experience”: Discuss.</p>
<p>I think I should just restate my main points here, because it seems that a lot of people don’t understand what I am trying to say. I want to make myself clear.</p>
<p>My first post in this thread was due to my reaction to the experience of my first year at Swarthmore. It seemed to me that I wasn’t engaging in many intellectual conversations. And I wasn’t alone, because a friend of mine called Swarthmore the land of pseudo-intellectuals. To give an example, I described an argument I had with my roommate, who basically said a lot of things that didn’t make sense. He confused being amoral with being inhuman, and uttered quotations from Confucius, in my opinion, to sound sophisticated and intellectual. My point was that my roommate thought of himself as intellectual, but I saw it as false intellect. I defined, in a later post, pseudo-intellectualism to be when you give off a pretentious air and try to sound intellectual, when you’re really not. So in my roommate’s case, he sounded intellectual by saying stuff from Confucius, but really, there was no intellect in it. I think I gave some other examples–people merely mentioning names like Freud just to sound intelligent, but perhaps knowing very little about Freud at all. Furthermore, I said that most conversations I had so far (by far) were casual.</p>
<p>So my question in all that was, Where is intellect to be found outside of class? Why aren’t people engaging in intellectual conversations? I was expecting genuinely intellectual conversations in large part because Swarthmore is known as a very intellectual school.</p>
<p>Now let me define what I mean by intellectual conversation. Intellectual conversation involves the exchange of ideas. Ideally, people are willing to listen to new ideas and share their opinions, backed by knowledge that they’ve gotten from class or elsewhere. I gave examples of what I mean by intellectual conversation in previous posts. I tried to emphasize that intellectual conversation has to have substance; it does not consist of merely witty side remarks; there have to be ideas and meaningful thoughts.</p>
<p>I tried to show that you can have intellectual conversations even when you do not share a standard body of knowledge with everyone else. In other words, you don’t need to “know everything about everything” to have a productive, meaningful conversation.</p>
<p>Eventually, I decided that I hadn’t found my niche of students and that I should try to start some intellectual conversations myself, hoping that others would join.</p>
<p>Recently, I’ve decided that in order to have the good, productive, substantive intellectual conversations I had in mind, there had to be more of a shared “mental bookshelf” than I thought. For example, it’s hard to engage in truly philosophical debate, I think, unless you’re talking to philosophy majors, or people who’ve gone beyond an intro-level philosophy course. If it’s just people with an intro-level understanding of philosophy discussing, the conversation will most likely be superficial, because they won’t have enough knowledge to have a substantive conversation. In other words, those intro-level people were ignorant/uninformed/without sufficient background knowledge–use whichever word you’d like.</p>
<p>The intellectual conversations that occur at Swarthmore, then, are often about politics or current events, because that’s a subject that a lot of Swatties have a shared knowledge of. Similarly, I concluded that I’m more likely to engage in these conversations when I’m a junior or senior taking honors seminars, where the students will have a deeper understanding of the material.</p>
<p>In the end, I lamented that Swatties didn’t have the shared background knowledge that I had expected when I had been told many times that Swarthmore was very intellectual. On reflection, Swatties are mostly students who did well in high school and who enjoy learning–we’re not Renaissance men, and we’re not capable (yet) of easily discussing all sorts of ideas. But I didn’t blame Swatties, or say that we’re just a bunch of stupid fools. </p>
<p>I can still find a group of students who could engage in those conversations, and start some myself and see where they lead, or just wait until I’m taking more advanced courses. For now I’ll learn more about politics–something that more Swatties know about.</p>
<p>So, to answer the question, “Is Swarthmore really that intellectual?” the answer would be, “No. But that’s OK, because there honestly would be no college in the country that would have the level of genuine intellectualism I was hoping for. It’s not that students here aren’t intellectual; it’s just that they’d have to be practically Renaissance men for my answer to be Yes. And of course not everyone wants to be having intellectual conversations all the time (That goes without saying.). It’s intellectual enough, and in fact, one poster said that Swatties were the most intellectual people he/she’s met. I’m probably not likely to find a much more intellectual college. I’m fine with that :)”</p>
<p>I have to hand it to you, you’ve managed to make “intellectualism” sound about as exciting as helping someone move out of their apartment. and, that’s not easy. What happened to the dchow of two years ago? Politics seemed pretty second nature to you back then. You make it sound like drudgery, now. :(</p>
<p>I don’t mean to sound difficult, but what are you talking about?</p>
<p>There’s no way I’m reading that entire dchow post. Can someone summarize it for me?</p>
<p>I think he’s basically saying , he was mistaken in his expectations of the preparedness of the avg Swarthmore first-year; they aren’t (for the most part) Renaissance men (and women) they’re lacking a common <em>lingua franca</em> necessary for “substantive” intellectual discourse. But, that it’s okay, he says, because no other college population is any better. he hopes to meet up with more knowledgeable upperclassmen.</p>
<p>My point is that he seems to be treating politics, pop culture and everyday topical ethics (such as whether to wake a roommate who refuses to buy an alarm) as though they were poor substitutes for the “real thing” and, that he didn’t always seem to be that self-consciously “intellectual”. My recollection of his posts back when he was a prospie was that he was very political, initially. I was just wondering what happened?</p>