To the Class of 2030: Don't Screw This Up

Standing athwart the Soll Center roof, yelling Stop.

Image credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne

Dear First-Years,

Welcome to CMC! Let’s make one thing clear, this isn’t a clickbait title. The first of 128 weeks is over. That’s about $3,000 in tuition. Plenty of writers in The Forum have waxed poetic on the importance of using this brief, pricey time wisely: Embrace the liberal arts and spurn the pre-professionalism found on every corner of CMC’s unduly geometric buildings. 

But quite candidly, it’s a struggle to persuade you all. Despite our best efforts, about 45 percent of you will enter post-grad jobs in finance and consulting. Many of you will donate back to CMC initiatives such as the Integrated Sciences program, which prioritizes scientific skill-building over scientific understanding. All of you risk experiencing CMC as a “white-collar trade school,” as one professor has called it, and nothing else.

The reason why persuasion is so difficult is because there are no clean “Just look what happened to him” cautionary tales. Few who cut corners in their classes, going on to pursue that “passion” for M&A law or that “interesting” investment banking career, are doomed to a fate of overwork and a miserable family life. In fact, many might end up content. 

Consider former editor-in-chief Henry Long’s discussion of eros, the Greek concept of longing. Modern man doesn’t have an excess of eros, Mr. Long argues. Instead, the manifold depths of our desires have ebbed. They’re weak. Our wants and ambitions are too easily satiated by the instant gratification of LinkedIn likes, new credentials, and prestigious job placements. 

If contentment means fulfilling your desires, you can do that — and perhaps more easily — if you’ve abased your desires. If you condition yourself to be satisfied by wealth, acclaim, and the applause for your white picket fence, you can live a perfectly fine life. But as the saying goes: “It’s better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” 

Knowing Mr. Long, he’d abhor our use of J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism, but his Plato’s Symposium suggests something similar. A typical CMC “outcome” may settle you comfortably on the first few rungs of Plato’s “ladder of love,” but there are richer, fuller objects of desire that lay higher up, whether you’re cognizant of them or not. This ignorance isn’t bliss. Even if FOMO never hits, you will have nevertheless missed out — and that is yet another form of suffering, even if it’s of the beige, muted variety. 

So what should we desire? That’s the unsatisfying part. We can’t exactly tell you. 

In good liberal fashion, we can’t force upon you any one “life of the mind,” certainly not when day-to-day realities affect everyone differently. For instance, a corporate wage might mitigate the very real fact that college is expensive and familial obligations persist. We also recognize that no institution or career can ever fully detach from politicking; even the most cloistered college relies on alums who line their pockets and then donate back.

This isn’t a hit piece on any one life path. It’s a hit piece on a life path that’s unexamined, one motivated by shallow desires that its traveler can barely justify to others, let alone himself. What we can tell you is that self-examination can begin at this very moment in college. We’ll draw our parallel with the Laches, a Platonic dialogue that begins with an investigation on the education of youth.

Socrates’s first two interlocutors are deciding how best to rear their sons, though they’re unable to determine what an education should entail. Prodded along by Socrates, they soon discover that an education in techne — skill within a particular industry — requires a more comprehensive knowledge of which “particular” you ought to pursue at all. 

There are plenty of opportunities at CMC to learn the particulars, from abiding by Strunk and White’s grammar rules (we’re looking at you, Professor Pitney) to evaluating investments with discounted cash flow analysis. CMC can also offer an architectonic education, or guidance governing the appropriate use of your techne. As everyone has certain capacities, to be of benefit to others, you must understand the right calling. 

With CMC’s general education requirements, you’ll read historians, philosophers, scientists, and social scientists who debated the notions of right and wrong, true and false. You’ll read about statesmen and public servants — perhaps even meet them at the Ath — who adapted these scholarly answers for public life in better and worse ways. As a senior, you’ll submit a thesis, your own small declaration of the truth (that itself will be contested by those who come after you). 

It may not seem like it, but these exercises will help you scrutinize yourself and everything you’re attached to, from your friendships to your five-year plans. These are methods of stepping outside of yourself, a break from the constant self-enhancement of vocational skills and elevator pitches. You’re at a liberal arts college to think about big ideas, abstractions that’ve been imprinted in those who came before you and those who’ll follow. If that doesn’t get you thinking about your own legacy — how you fit into this order — well, we don’t know what will. 

You can use your education to enrich your appetites, aspiring to nothing more than the ranks of the bourgeois-bohemians, the professional managerial class, the yuppies — name the epithet and some of our alums have most certainly earned it. But CMC’s academic experiences, if pursued earnestly, demand that you climb the ladder of love and learn what you should desire. 

And yes, you’ll probably come to see that what you’ve wanted and worked for is vacuous. That’s okay. Climbing the ladder of love is frightening, but trust that this ascent will be a little easier when you lift your gaze from your LinkedIn page and level it on the vast landscape of knowledge and experience here at CMC.