Author: Miriam Zami

Feminism and Greek Life

Something that we didn’t really get to in class is the social atmosphere on campus, primarily because (I think) we’ve been emphasizing that the average college student is no longer the 4-year residential student in Harvard-esque dorms and leafy green fields. And while we at a commuter campus may not feel the same atmosphere of “college” as some residential schools do, I think it’s an interesting topic nonetheless and speaks to the students of this generation.

This Times article from a few weeks ago, entitled “When a Feminist Pledges a Sorority,” talks about the seemingly contradictory values of feminism and Greek life. For some reason, over the last few years, sorority pledging has spiked significantly, much to the dismay of the feminists of the 70s and 80s. While many feminists (especially of generations past) see the sorority structure as an expression of white male dominance–many sororities have strict standards for dress and makeup, and national chapters still prohibit alcohol in their houses, for instance–today’s undergraduate feminists aim to redefine the role of the sorority. Many sororities have coordinated networking events for their members, held discussion forums on gender and sexuality, and act as a support system for young, ambitious women. And while the desire to be part of Greek life may seem like playing into male supremacy, many of these young women speak about today’s sororities as a way of destroying the patriarchy “from the inside.” After all, fraternity alumni make up a huge part of Fortune 500 CEOs, and many Silicon Valley success stories (Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram) had their base in a frat house. Undergraduate women see today’s sororities as their opportunity to build up lasting connections and advance their professional careers.

Before I read this article, I think I had a negative view of the whole pledging system and Greek life–who would want to stand in front of a bunch of judgmental women in heels and makeup, waiting for an evaluation? It feels so demeaning. But reading about these young feminists and the potential they view in sororities, I feel more inspired. Of course, sororities still have what to improve on, like broadening their inclusiveness and removing the ban on alcohol (which would give sororities control over parties, likely diminishing cases of sexual assault), but they could be heading there. Maybe there’s still a way to go until a college startup run by sorority women turns into the next Facebook, but I’d be very excited when it happens.

Are You a Sprinter, Wanderer, or Straggler?

An article in last week’s New York Times by none other than our favorite–Jeff Selingo–spoke of the three types of college graduate: the Sprinter, the Wanderer, and the Straggler. While doing so, Selingo highlighted many of the challenges facing this generation of college graduates: student debt, job hopping (as a recent post discussed), unemployment, delay of financial independence, and more. He also emphasized the failure of the “one size fits all” approach to higher education, which is something we’ve been toying with the last many weeks in our seminar.

Selingo pointed out early that the journey to adulthood is steadily increasing, and termed the age group of 18 to 25-year olds “emerging adults,” after the term coined by a psychology professor in the 90s. This age group is grappling with feeling simultaneously grown up and not so grown up at the same time, hence the “emerging.” During this age group, not only is the college degree the biggest determinant of their future professional success, but how they navigate their college years is also fundamental.

That’s where the categories come in. You’re a Sprinter if you’ve known what you wanted to major in since entering college; you’ve been lining up increasingly impressive internships summer after summer; you have a job set after college with little or no student debt. Sprinters are the most able to job-hop, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since it allows important exploration. They can do this because of the lack of student debt weighing them down, which forces college grads to choose money over interest, happiness, location, or the like. Sprinters, therefore, are more likely to take chances with business–you’ll likely see a Sprinter working in an incubator housing fresh start-ups soon after graduation, feeling good about themselves (I assume).

As a Wanderer, you may have had great grades in high school and a stellar GPA in college, but you’re on an uncertain path. You’ve applied for countless jobs in many different fields, to no avail. You’re likely underemployed, meaning overqualified for the job you’re working at, like nearly half of all undergraduates. Or you’ve resorted to graduate school to help you “figure it out”; after all, 30 percent of college graduates are back in school within 2 years. Wanderers may have benefited from a gap year to explore interests and career options before college instead of being thrown into something they didn’t know how to navigate. The longer you wander, Selingo notes ominously, the harder it is to catch up.

If none of the above describe you, you may be a Straggler. This is you if you’re drifting through your twenties, in and out of school, putting academic performance last on your list of “important things to do in college.” You may stay at home after high school and get a job, or join the military. Maybe you’ve found your calling at age 30 while in your parents’ garage. After all, there are 12.5 million 20-somethings with some college credit but no degree out there, virtually no better off than if they’d never gone to college at all.

Point is, there’s a lot more to the “emerging adult” years than just graduating college, like navigating life outside of the classroom and building relationships. These are the things that can determine whether you become a Sprinter, Wanderer or Straggler. Which do you envision yourself as?

 

Grit and Resilience

As a follow up to today’s class discussion, I just came across this op-ed in the New York Times from Sunday entitled “Hidden Gold in College Applications.” It discusses how some colleges are placing less emphasis on SAT/ACT scores and GPA, and are instead focusing on things in students’ applications–namely, reference letters and personal statements–that highlight aspects of character, emphasizing words like “resilience” and “grit,” just as we spoke about in class. Things like obtaining decent grades and consistent volunteering are all the more significant when the student is cooking dinner for her brother three times a week while their mom is at work, or is working 30 hours a week at the family business. The article ties this in with major discussions lately about reforming college admissions to increase greater socioeconomic diversity, a subject we talked about at length.

The article also mentions some administrators’ fear that “if you put students in an academic environment that’s too tough for them, you’re setting them up to fail.” This reminds me of Scalia’s stance in the affirmative action case. Yet the article goes on to show the success stories of students who were admitted based on this more holistic, and I think personal, perspective.

I think this is taking a step in the right direction for college admissions, especially when we talk about students of low socioeconomic or limiting backgrounds. This type of process will also encourage more students who come from these backgrounds to apply to schools that they would have thought wouldn’t accept them. We read in some of the readings (I don’t remember which) how minority or low socioeconomic students generally shy away from even applying to “good” schools, and I’m not even talking about the Ivy Leagues. Modifying the traditional admissions process could be a key in creating greater diversity on college campuses, and it provides very deserving students, albeit less privileged, with an opportunity to succeed.

The Coddling of the American Mind

Although this isn’t directly related to our topics at hand, I recently recalled a great article I read earlier this year that is relevant to today’s higher education. The September issue of The Atlantic featured a cover story, written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, that raised a lot of questions about the way college students protect themselves from words and ideas that they don’t like in the name of emotional well-being. Their basic premise was that the hypersensitivity rampant on most college campuses is damaging both to students’ education and their mental health.

Students have more and more been using “emotional reasoning” as legal evidence; the argument “I feel it, so it must be true” is considered legitimate. For instance, a white student was found guilty at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The picture of the Ku Klux Klan rally on the book’s cover offended another student, despite the fact that the book valued the student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan. Examples like this one show that it has been considered unacceptable to doubt the reasonableness of someone’s emotional state, especially when tied to group identity. Claiming offense to something has become “an unbeatable trump card.”

Something else very common among college campuses is the use of trigger warnings in class. Students assume that they know how others will react, and that reaction will be devastating. Preventing this becomes a “moral obligation” incumbent upon everyone. Some books that have been called out for trigger warnings include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (racial violence) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (misogyny and physical abuse). The authors point out that according to basic tenets in psychology, it is completely counterproductive to help someone with anxiety disorders avoid the thing they’re afraid of. Furthermore, it is detrimental to one’s education as a student and a person to just skip over the parts of history and literature that are uncomfortable.

The list goes on and on, and the examples get even wilder. One professor faced angry demonstrations after he lowercased the I in the word indigenous in a student’s paper, which she had capitalized; students claimed it was an insult to her and her ideology. One student wrote a satirical piece for a student newspaper about students’ hypersensitization to absurd microaggressions. He was terminated from another paper he wrote for and his dorm room door was vandalized with raw eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.”

“When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response,” Lukianoff and Haidt write. In terms of education (the point of college?), this atmosphere creates “intellectual homogeneity,” and in fact does a disservice to students by allowing them to think that they can make everyone agree with them. Instead, college should be a place where students feel intellectually engaged with diverse viewpoints and honest discussion. The way it stands now, we are perpetrating the idea that you can’t learn anything from someone who thinks differently than you, which is harmful to students’ learning process and mental development.

Real life doesn’t comfort people by giving them “trigger warnings.” College shouldn’t be a cocoon where we can snap our fingers and make all ideas we disagree with disappear. Instead, our college education should be equipping us with the skills needed to respond to people we disagree with in an open way, not in one that allows extreme subjectivity to reign and demonizes our opponents. We need, of course, to be respectful and sensitive to all students, but we need to do that while allowing for students and their opinions to grow and be heard. Universities need to rethink the type of student they want to develop.

I highly recommend you read the full article; it’s much more interesting than I make it seem. The authors go into a lot of other interesting things happening on campus as well as a sociological account of why this is happening with the current generation of students. Also, I’d be really interested in hearing people’s thoughts, because at it’s very nature, this is a sensitive topic. Do you see this sort of behavior on Brooklyn College’s campus?

College Unbound Chapter 5

This chapter focused on creating a personalized education primarily through the incredible means of data analytics. Some of the issues and/or questions raised:

  1. Software for the classroom, not just outside of it. This is something totally new to me; we’ve all heard of online classes, or even hybrids, but the program described, Knewton, really takes the technology to a whole new level. It allows students to move at their own pace, which is beneficial for everyone. The teacher is more of an advisor as opposed to the primary educator, and it allows students to be more active in their learning. Does this mean the role of an educator in the future going to change? What is the primary role of an educator anyway–to spit out information, or to ensure that students are learning and motivated? New learning software like Knewton puts the question into perspective.
  2. Software to help students choose a college, or maybe even to choose it for them. Currently, programs like Naviance are aiding students in their quest for the right fit, but Craig Powell, the founder of ConnectEDU, hopes to one day get rid of the whole admissions process altogether because “an algorithm will have already told them.” Are we relying too much on the algorithms? Or rather, is there something in choosing a college that a data software can’t mimic? It could very well be the emotional aspect that Selingo spoke about elsewhere in the book–the reason why many students make bad decisions. So maybe it’s not such a terrible thing if the computer leaves that out completely and places you purely on the analytics, right?
  3. Similarly, these sorts of software can have an impact on the college search for students, not only the student search for college. Colleges can make smarter moves in advertising to certain demographics or types of students, instead of subscribing to the expensive and excessive mode of marketing to students. I personally remember getting hundreds of brochures in 11th and 12th grade. Regarding many of them, I would just think to myself, “if they knew the first thing about me they wouldn’t advertise to me.” Or maybe they’d just advertise smarter, which is also better.
  4. Software to advise students during college, like Degree Compass. Despite being “incredibly accurate,” is it limiting students’ choice? Selingo brings this up more than once, and I think it’s a very valuable point to discuss. It moves us further into the realm of viewing college as a pre-constructed road map to getting the degree, which seems to be the only thing we care about getting. But, as Selingo says, we are moving into a different world–dropout rates are higher than ever, and college tuition is steadily climbing. “It simply costs too much money not to follow roadmap.” Is that the end for exploring passions and curiosities for most students, and should we worry?
  5. There’s the aforementioned issue of limiting students’ curiosity, but in addition, I think programs like Degree Compass may limit students’ willingness to accept a challenge. The example given of the fictional Jessica depicts the student switching majors after an apprehensive one star given for stats. Is the program encouraging students to shy away from anything that may be slightly difficult and resort to only the things she’s best at? What happened to doing something you enjoy over something you’re good at? It seems to be in line with the previous question, and may come down to the same thing–it simply costs to much money not to focus solely on the thing you’re best at. The greater issues here seems to be of the changing value of the degree and purpose of higher education altogether, a theme which is explored consistently by Selingo.