Last Thoughts Before I Go Abroad

Tomorrow I leave on a bus at 6:15AM, and don’t stop until I reach Thailand. Over the next year I’ll be traveling in Asia, and I won’t be back to Carleton until Spring term next year. I’ve given up my positions on campus and finished my classes, I just need to pack up my bags and go.

I thought it would be nice to make a brief list of things I’ve learned while writing this blog.

• There are people who know all kinds of things and are just waiting to be asked. There’s also a wealth of information hidden in the internet.
• It’s better to pick classes based on professors, not content. It doesn’t matter how interested you are in the title of the course; the professor makes or breaks the class.
• Blogs with pictures are more interesting.
• People care more about a good blog post every couple days than a shallow post every day.
• Effort and cool ideas don’t always equal good outcomes. Sometimes a project just ends as a waste of time.
• But, some catastrophes are fun.
• Simple answers are hard to come by, but that shouldn’t paralyze the school.
• School life is short. Your projects will go farther if you create organizations instead of doing everything yourself.
• Professors are humans.
• Carleton has high points and low points. It’s unhealthy to focus too much on either.
• A small number of students speak for the whole student body. This situation is not just a tragic feature of college life. Blaming “student apathy” is an excuse for ineffective organizing. It is our fault that we are not communicating better with the student body and creating venues to discuss college life.

I’ll post when I can.

Spree of Vandalism

Tempting?

On the subject of students being obnoxious, there has been a recent string of vandalism across campus. This has include, among other things, four vending machines vandalized, five fire-alarms pulled, and a radiator ripped from the wall. Someone even urinated in Sevy Tearoom during a party.

This idiocy has cost the college more than $10,000. At a recent CSA Senate meeting, Cat McMurtry recommended that CSA foot the bill. If you know who did it, please tell the deans. $10,000 is roughly equivalent one third of the money for Spring Concert.

The Environmental Science Major

Last week at the Education and Curriculum Committee, science and humanities faculty described their proposal for an Enivironmental Science major. The proposal is interesting not only because the subject matter is so fascinating, but because the major proposal struggles to find a way to uniquely combine the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences in the study of the environment.

A drawing of the Arb by Alice Newman '11. It was drawn for Field Drawing, one of the ENVS classes.

The Environmental Science major is laid out as follows:

• An introductory course in biology or geology.
• A methods course (Intro to Geospatial Analysis or Intro to Statistics)
• Three core courses that all of the majors will take: Ecosystems Ecology, Environmental Economics and Policy, and American Environmental History
• Four classes in one of the four foci. The foci each hone in on a different aspect of environmental science. They are:
  • Food and Agriculture
  • Conservation and Development
  • Landscapes and Perceptions
  • Water Resources
• Comps

The comps proposal itself is exciting in its ambition. All the ENVS majors for a single year will be focused on some enormously broad interdisciplinary subject. For example: Biodiversity. Under this topic there will be small groups of students focusing on some aspect of the topic (for example: ethical implications of using Amazon rain forest for medicinal purposes). The small groups approach their specific topic in an interdisciplinary way, so every small group would have natural science ENVS majors, social science ENVS majors and humanities ENVS majors all working together. At the end all the groups come together and present a symposium and a unified paper.

Photo from the arb website.

The whole thing sounds amazing. It takes the individual major (toiling in obscurity on comps) and makes her part of a greater effort. Of course it won’t be everything I imagine during the first year of comps, but the program will grow and evolve.

There are some concerns about the major, but I am confident they will be put to rest and Environmental Science will become a major. I believe that this kind of interdisciplinary work presents a unique angle that a liberal arts college can offer that other institutions cannot.

When Students Hurt Students

The Carletonian editorial page has recently featured a line-up of articles that remind us how human we are. These are the kinds of things we want to believe don’t happen, students hurting students. Here is a brief summation:

Some unthinking student took Samir Bhala’s helmet which protects him from sunlight. Bhala has a severe allergy to sunlight and has had to make due without his helmet because even in the face of a campus-wide search (including an email to every student from Dean Baggot), it has not been returned.

One student wrote a searing attack on Robert Stephens during the CSA elections (read the response here). The attack was not only deeply slanderous, but based completely on hearsay. This editorial, which should have immediately raised red flags for anyone reading it, was approved by the editors of the Carletonian and printed.

Most disturbing of all, an anonymous student went to great lengths to threaten an African-American male student. The threats were terrifying in their open hostility and hatred.

What are we supposed to make of this? Max Davidson responded in the Carletonian:

“The less representative the student body is of the world that surrounds us, the more it sees itself as an alternate reality. On a Friday night at Carleton, the most basic human instincts are displayed because we know that by Sunday morning, we gain immunity by hitting the books on the first floor of the library.”

This Friday I went to the final hockey game of the season, where we defeated our rival St. Olaf in an upset victory. The game was exciting and fun, but it was also a public venue for the “basic human instincts” Davidson is speaking about. The crowd was intoxicated and violent. As we won, Carleton students chanted about having better SAT scores.

All of this is adds up to the Campus Climate Survey in anecdotal form. A reminder that although we’re proud of our school and our community, we cannot pretend that our problems are external. Animosity and indifference among the student body are the most important factors making campus life difficult.

Karimba Recital

Today I went to a  relaxing karimba performance in the Libe athenaeum. A karimba is an African instrument consisting of a wood component and metal tongs that are strummed. Here’s a brief video I took at the event, which shows some of the thumbwork and music.

Trayless Dilemma

Waiting to be served at Burton Dining Hall.

This week’s Carletonian featured two editorials arguing that Carleton should not go trayless. The first was by German Professor Anne Ulmer who writes of her concern that going trayless will cause the dining halls to be more chaotic and dangerous. The issue this editorial raises is a valid one, will going trayless make the dining hall less handicapped accessible? I don’t know the answer.

The second, more detailed editorial by Kyle Kramer makes a number of arguments that going trayless isn’t the best way to reduce food waste. He writes, “The effort to change peoples’ habits of taking too much food is much more likely to be successful if it does not hinge on making their lives more difficult.”

But I think this too narrow a view. It’s important to view the issue in context. Carleton students live some of the easiest lives on the planet. Imagine that you were offered the chance to switch places with a random 20-year-old somewhere on earth. You would be a fool to accept.

Furthermore, we live in country that is struggling with a food waste epidemic:

According to the U.N. World Food Programme, the total U.S. food surplus could satisfy “every empty stomach in Africa”.

If, by making this relatively small change, we can save a lot of food (and no one seems to disagree with that) then it is our obligation to do so. Humans are flexible and Carleton students are no exception. Most students make two trips to get food already.

I am a perfect example of why we should go trayless. I try not to waste food, but when I’m holding a tray it’s just so easy to take more. The huge size of the tray almost begs me to fill up the whole thing with food, and as a result I end up throwing out leftovers or stuffing myself.

I haven’t heard anybody make a better suggestion on how we can decrease our food waste. If there are no better solutions, I support going trayless without reservation.

Historical Carleton and the Legend of Fabeetz

I was looking for information about Carleton construction the other day, and I stumbled upon a great website with all kinds of historical Carleton information. Among other things, it has a number of photographs with historical and current day comparisons.

There’s also a forum called Cobwebs where members of the Carleton community discussed trivia and history. Some of the discussions have gems hidden in them.

We’ve all heard the legends of Joe Fabeetz, the fictional student who won CSA Senate elections with a write in campaign started in a Carletonian article. Here is the complete Fabeetz platform, thanks to the Cobwebs website:

Education.  Have you ever been burned trying to know her?  Raw sex, as they say, is better than cooked.  Look around you.  If you’ve any taste left at all you’ll realize that there’s no taste left at all. The once raw flesh is now bland and overcooked.

We devour whatever is put before us.  The wild game in the bush is the best to be had, but it is to be pursued, not plopped down before us on a platter, cooked and dressed.  We may consume great knowledge, but we never really taste it.

Pre-meds have become the slaughtered scapegoat of our hungry frustrations, perhaps because there the irony is most apparent.  Where now is the life?  All the vital forces have been drained away, our selves embalmed with deterministic mechanism.  But I’m talking of more than just biology; the humanities too have lost their humanity.  We are taught to grovel in the dust of ages, worshipping the earth once walked upon.  As for myself, I’m not just running for CSA senate; I’m running for my life…for my reality.

Why is my Dorm so Ugly?

While wandering around campus Carls often wonder, “Why are some of the buildings so artfully designed while others look so terrible?” Burton, Evans, and Norse are beautiful constructions of brick and mortar. Every year during room draw, these highly coveted dorms go quickly.

The entrance to Burton

Musser, Myers, and Watson are quite the opposite. They dominate the landscape with their brutal corners and eye-sore facades. Freshmen outnumber all others in each of these dorms, as they are some of the last chosen during room draw.

The sharp contrast in these buildings can be traced to two construction fevers which swept through the college. From 1914 to 1928, the college constructed eight buildings including Nourse, the Chapel, and Burton. These constructions still look wonderful with their brick facades and lavish woodwork.

But then the economy collapsed. Construction halted completely, and wasn’t begun again until veterans returning from World War II were pushing Carleton enrollment to record levels. The college desperately needed to expand, and in 1958 it began a decade of construction.

Unfortunately for the college, this construction took place during a tragic era of architecture. During this time, the college constructed no less than seven impressively ugly buildings, including Musser, Myers, Watson and the least popular of all dorms, Goodhue.

Myers

Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who later went on to design World Trade Center buildings 1 and 2, was there to help the college expand. A practitioner of “romanticized modernism,” Yamasaki designed West Gym, Cowling, Watson, Goodhue, Olin, and 4th floor of Myers which was added three years after the original construction. It was he who, inspired by the heyday of Cold War architecture, created the distinctly unappealing look of these buildings. He even designed another Musser/Myers clone for the location where the new dorms are being built now. Thank god it was never approved.

The new dorms under construction.

As time goes on the “legacy” buildings, those built before 1958, look all the more grand compared to those built later. The Language and Dining Center, completed in 2001, looks… quirky… but it is still modern enough to impress. Memorial and Cassat were obviously designed to emulate Norse with high-tech interior.

Like many institutions, Carleton can only mourn the construction it undertook in the 1960’s.

Special thanks to Carlteton Archivist Eric Hillemann, without whose help this post would have been even more inaccurate.

Darts on a Wall: Picking a Major

Because I’m participating in the Beijing Seminar, I need to declare my major this term. I’ve known for some time that I would be declaring an Asian Studies major focusing in East Asia/Political Science. Now I’ve officially checked the box and turned in the form.

Narrowing the focus of my study is exciting but disappointing. Exciting because I’m going to be studying abroad for three, maybe four terms. Disappointing because I wanted to explore so many other things at Carleton.

If I was magically given another year at Carleton, here is what I would study:

• Educational Studies, specifically issues of privilege which are so pertinent to life at Carleton.
• Environmental Science, specifically ecosystems and environmental justice
• Women and Gender Studies
• English with George Shuffleton
• Studio Art, which I never managed to schedule in
• Art History
• Sociology Anthropology classes (I took intro but never made it to any others)

Freshmen and Sophomore years are supposed to be a time of exploration, but looking at my transcript, mine don’t look that way. Of the eighteen classes I’ll have completed by the end of sophomore year, only five of them will have been electives. I traded my electives for language classes and the opportunity to study abroad extensively. Although it’s a decision I’m glad that I made, I also wish I could have had both.

Oh well, at least I got to play broom ball.

The Kharmic Cycles of Student Life

The elections concluded last week with the uncontested election of CSA President-Elect Duer and Treasurer-Elect Duane. Despite the best turnout in years, the Carletonian titled “Uncontested Race for CSA President Points to Apathy in Students.” Few things are constant in life, but we can be confident in saying students will always blame other students for being apathetic.

Here is an excerpt about CSA written by Carleton Archivist Eric Hillemann, written in 1991:

It has been quite common for at least one of the three major offices in the
CSA (President, Vice President, and Treasurer) to be taken by an unopposed
candidate.  Less frequently have there been two positions with unopposed
candidates.  In the past ten years, there have been a half-dozen elections
with two unopposed candidates for office, and this year, all three
positions were unopposed (for the first time?  Possibly).

Students have been complaining in the Tonian about apathy towards elections and lack of Senate-Student Body communication for about twenty-five years.

That statement is as true today as it was when it was written 18 years ago. Every year a new class of students comes in ready to criticize each other for not being engaged. I did the same thing right on this blog.

Student life, like samsara, is cyclical.

If there is one defining aspect of student life, it is that you only do it once. The student body is driven by its constant regeneration; perpetually invigorating the leadership with new blood while robbing it of its experience. In some ways, it reflects the Buddhist cycle of rebirth, samsara.

As Robert Michels writes, “The democratic currents of history resemble successive waves. They break ever on the same shoal. They are ever renewed. This enduring spectacle is simultaneously encouraging and depressing.”