When I hear my peers talk about what they want out of their experience at the College, I think of the first section of the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsburg: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving / hysterical naked, / […] with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies / good to eat a thousand years.”
What are we, as the minds of our generation, doing?
I think, for the most part, the minds of the College are really trying their best. Before even taking a class, students plan on going to Wall Street, getting recruited for consulting, or matriculating to medical school or law school. We have lofty aims, which is laudable in itself. That strong desire to achieve something through determination and hard work is even carved into the stone of Hopkins Gate: “Climb high / climb far / your goal the sky / your aim the star.”
But, I argue, there is a culture on campus of doing things solely to achieve our aims without a deeper reason other than propelling ourselves to wealth and comfort. That is, I want to point out that I think something is very wrong with our conception of success, and how we share it: We’re losing the value of a Williams education when we lose a guiding principle outside of material success.
I argue that, for the majority, that vague phrase “success” is part of the reason we wake up in the morning. For a lot of us, myself included, success exists in the dream of a well-paying, stable job. It exists in the list of abilities that we are told to acquire. To be successful, we tell ourselves we need a 4.0 GPA. We need a competitive internship. An award. An impressive contrivance to put in our resume or LinkedIn.
I fear pursuing any of these metrics directly makes us lose sight of what does not directly benefit ourselves. We work hard, yes, but perhaps only to make ourselves appear hireable or competitive as applicants. We do good, yes, but perhaps only so we can tell our potential employers we did so.
Of course, a student who does good things solely for their resume still does real good in the world, but to me these fragments of purported altruism seem to be at best the rigid performance of a minor duty that does not address or even acknowledge the need for love and the alleviation of misery. We are already statistically through a quarter of our lives, and yet making the meager existence of everyone else’s often challenging and painful time on Earth a little bit better falls out of our to-do lists. In the quest for success, we even forget to call our moms, dads, and loved ones, or tend to our friendships outside the College, much less make the effort to be kind to the stranger in the dining hall. So, I want to ask if what we are doing currently is truly valuable: When we choose the object on which to focus our intellectual strength, does it do anything besides lift ourselves up?
I’d like to look at two common post-Williams archetypes: consultants and Wall Street investors. Even though these careers can be very meaningful, or give some sense of personal fulfillment, the prevailing sentiment among students at the College is that one needs to go into these fields to get rich. Network with consulting firms and do hellish years on Wall Street — just to ascend to the top of the food chain. I feel like this opportunistic attitude exists to some extent in us all, which is why we ought to temper it.
When Allen Ginsberg asks us “what sphinx […] bashed open [our] skulls and ate up [our] brains and imagination,” I fear that this is the creature: A tireless quest for grades themselves and the vain notion that we hold of them. I fear that by virtue of chasing these things solely for our own monetary gain, we lose sight of learning, in its ideal form — the pursuit of understanding not only knowledge but what it means to be human.
If we act only to gain connections from the College that will help land us a job, we lose interest in learning for the sake of it. For many of us, these narrow goals lead us to scouring professor reviews on WSO to make sure we take the easiest classes. And even when we put effort into our classes and our intellectual growth, we may only do so because we want to outcompete others in the workforce. Perhaps it is not surprising that, when embedded in this kind of thinking, our education becomes a mere commodity. After all, U.S. News & World Report ranks the College as the second “best value” liberal arts institution, a metric based on a school’s academic quality and its true cost after need-based financial aid.
The culture of focusing on how being at the College can launch us into profitable careers explains the anger we sometimes feel towards a professor when we get a B. Because our education is merely a means to a comfortable life, any bad grade is a betrayal of the money and time we put into being at the College. More than wanting an A, we think we need an A because an A means acceptance into graduate school, a competitive position, or whatever else it takes to assimilate into the privileged elite.
When we talk about how many students use artificial intelligence in a way that breaks the honor code, I hope we examine if the way we define success is partly to blame. If we do not value knowledge for the good it brings to others and in itself but rather as a vehicle to a sheltered life, we already operate in a way that denigrates it. This mindset sees AI as simply another way to ensure the future that we want: A good job and a comfortable life.
Of course, motivations for ascending up the socioeconomic ladder are often well intentioned. For many students, getting a well-paying job is in pursuit of the goal of helping their families. I just hope our motivations also include love and the alleviation of suffering, and that we can find something to occupy our capacities that befits the limited and valuable time we and our fellow creatures possess.
Sam Geller ’29 is from Lenox, Mass.
