My first-year seminar ended this week, which means I can turn my collar back around and quit preaching.
The freshman seminar, for the handful of you whose only connection to Penn State is hearing the Old Main chimes from your deck, is designed as antidote to the 800-seat lecture hall experiences that scar new students for life at large universities.
The idea is to give the newbies a chance to interact with a prof and each other in a class that’s capped at 20 students. The FYS is generally a one-credit course so it either meets for an hour per week throughout the semester, or 90 minutes for half the semester or three hours for the first five weeks. I did the five-week version, which is why my freshpersons’ first college course is now officially in the books.
My FYS was called “How to Read the Newspaper – and Why You Should” because I teach journalism and I thought it would make my job easier if my students examined a few newspaper stories before they started writing them. I also have this idea that our only hope in a society where liars and ignoramuses have the loudest voices is for our young people to develop finely calibrated BS detectors.
So when my freshmen tell me they’re not interested in politics I say sorry, you’re not allowed not to be interested in politics. In a democracy, I thunder, apathy and inaction are a kind of action: You’re ceding power to others.
When they tell me they’re not interested in local news because they’re not from these parts, I point out that they’re living in these parts now, which obliges them to do what they can to make it a better place. Wherever you go from here, I argue, you’re going to want the citizens of that place to have nixed plans for a toxic waste dump; you need to do the same for the people who will follow you to Happy Valley.
But I don’t just preach to my freshmen about the importance of being informed and engaged. I also exhort them to go to all their classes, even the ones where the instructors don’t take attendance; to take in campus galleries and performances; to hike in Penn’s woods; to eat right, sleep enough and go easy on the sauce.
I’m sure they find me insufferable but I want to get to them before the prevailing undergraduate culture does. Judging from their writings about their first month at Penn State, I may be too late.
Most of them are deliriously happy to be here. Their first football game was a peak experience. Their essays drip with Penn State Pride.
My first impulse when I read this stuff is to mime jamming my index finger down my throat. Man, I mutter, did they drink the blue Kool-Aid, or what?
I try to understand: I get that the herding instinct is particularly powerful when you’re young and new and uncertain. I recognize that I view this school spirit stuff through the lens of my own alienated experience as a student during the Nixon years. Back then, all that rah-rah stuff seemed as passé as pompadours. Although what was so great about being too cool to care?
Last Saturday I was offered a ticket to Penn State-Kent State. I hesitated. These early games against vastly inferior opponents (or, in the case of the Alabama game, vastly superior opponents) are rarely interesting and I was in the middle of a painting project at home. But I decided to go because the fact is I like watching sports and, in my understated professorial way, I root for Penn State.
The morning of the game, I went to the supermarket and ran into tailgaters picking up last-minute Danish pastry trays and the like. One shopper who looked to be in her 40s had paw-printed her cheek and stuck a cheerleader’s pom-pom in her ponytail.
If I were as generous as I should be I would say, hey, if she’s having fun, where’s the harm? But seeing her made me not want to go to the game (I went anyway; the game stunk).
It’s kind of like what I was saying last week about news coverage of the would-be Koran burner in Florida. What we have here is a disproportion problem. When I hear the epic-sounding theme music on football telecasts and see the fans in their camera-courting costumes I picture a pump filling a ball with more air than it can hold. I want to hold my ears.
I’m thrilled that the kids in my freshman seminar are thrilled to be here. I just wish they would care a little less about the rah-rah stuff and a little more about, say, the November election.
