One of the tabs I’ve had open for quite a while now is an article titled “AWOL from Academics,” published by the Harvard Magazine (yes, I know…). This features a current undergrad lamenting the fact that he and his classmates spend vastly more time on extracurricular activities than course work. This is presented as a fall from a more enlightened state in the past, when students believed that “the primary reason for your being in the College was to take courses, and to spend a lot of time on them,” (in the words of one faculty member alumnus), and when another professor “spent most of his time at Harvard taking five or six classes a semester without doing extracurriculars.”
The primary explanation offered for this is grade inflation—since every Harvard student gets an A in every class, even for work that’s not their best, they need to distinguish themselves through extracurriculars. Or so the logic goes. Students are no longer driven by a pure and noble interest in learning for its own sake, but have graspingly materialistic aims, and are choosing to allocate their efforts in ways that maximize non-academic returns.
This is mildly novel to hear from a Young Person; one of the Kids These Days denouncing themselves. One of the mild advantages of being a certified Old Person (just ask my kids), though, is that I have enough perspective to see this differently. My undergrad days are more than three decades behind me now, and I’m rapidly approaching a quarter-century as a faculty member. I’m probably considerably closer in age to the faculty reminiscing about the idyllic past than to the student enduring the grubby present (one of the two named faculty in the piece is 20 years older than me, the other about 8, though he was tenured around the same time I was; the 5-6 classes guy is not identified).
And from that perspective, I have to say that I kind of think this is bullshit. That is, I don’t actually think that students in my era were dramatically more intellectually motivated than the students of today. That’s not to say that there weren’t people taking 5-6 classes a semester and doing no extracurriculars back then, it’s just that the rest of us thought they were fucking weirdos.
One of the best pieces of advice I got from a senior colleague when I started this job was “Don’t expect your students to be like you were.” The point being that the students who will go on to become future faculty members are a tiny and unrepresentative subset of the larger student population. They’re significantly more likely to be more academically motivated, and more dedicated than the median student when it comes to things like getting work done to the best of their ability. Which means that when, as a faculty member, you reflect back on what you were like as an undergrad, you are on treacherous ground from which to project anything onto the rest of the student body.
I was probably somewhat closer to the median student than many of my faculty colleagues were in their day, because I was a rugby player in college, and thus devoted a good deal of time to violent collisions and public intoxication. There were plenty of times when I had to choose between class work and drunken revelry, and I’m not sure class work posted a .500 winning percentage in those. (Academics made a late surge in my junior and senior years, but definitely took a lot of L’s when I was a freshman and sophomore…)
To be sure, I was more academically oriented than the median rugby player, but by and large was playing the same game the author of that piece is lamenting. I was very regularly putting a higher priority on a set of extracurricular activities than on my general class work, and picking and choosing where to exert my efforts academically to maximize the expected return. (We didn’t all get A’s back then— my overall GPA was around a B+— though even in the 90’s professors lamented that grade inflation had turned C’s into B’s…)
This was, I think, pretty typical, as it is now. The vast majority of the people I interacted with had extracurricular interests of one sort of another, and often split their efforts in ways that didn’t favor academics. I knew people who were first and foremost members of teams from a wide range of sports (varsity or club), and others who were primarily associated with various other groups— bands, clubs, political groups, even informal but regularly recurring parties. Everybody did academics to some extent (I knew a couple of guys who flunked out, but that was exceedingly rare), but almost nobody did exclusively academics.
So, I find it extremely hard to believe there was ever a time when the typical student at Harvard or anywhere else was purely focused on their academic endeavors. The old professors who think that was the case are over-generalizing from the (frankly) anomalous experiences of their personal undergraduate circles. I don’t really doubt that they were highly motivated to pursue scholarly goals, because that’s part of what makes a future professor, but I don’t believe that was ever the median student experience. The notion that the college or university experience was ever about the pure life of the mind is a lie, and has been for the better part of a millennium— today’s undergraduates have nothing on the antics some of the students of the medieval era got up to.
(This is of a piece with the not-uncommon faculty lament that they don’t spend (enough of) their time just reading books or thinking Deep Thoughts. Which, on the one hand is true, but on the other hand, there’s never been a time when everybody in academia was blissfully engaged in pure scholarship with no other responsibilities or distractions.)
And, on the whole, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. There’s never been a time when most college students were going to go on to be professional academics, and there probably never should be. And unless that’s your goal, it’s probably just fine to be splitting time between multiple activities that help you stand out in non-academic ways. Honestly, it’s probably healthier for future faculty to have some outside interests, too…
Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong about a sense of mild regret at not having maximized academic opportunities, either. That’s perfectly appropriate for a senior heading into their final semesters of college. But, you know, that’s not something exclusive to college, it’s just life. Almost nobody closes any chapter of their life— high school, college, a career— without feeling like they missed out on something. There are absolutely subjects that I wish I had studied, lectures and performances I wish I had attended, things I wish I had taken more seriously when I was an undergrad. But then, I would say the same about the period when I was a grad student, and when I was a post-doc, and much of my faculty career.
While every stage of life comes with its missed opportunities and faint regrets, though, I’m not sure I’d trade any of my accepted opportunities for the ones I passed up. After all, all those accumulated choices, decisions made for reasons good or not-so-good, are what brought me to where I am today, and all in all, I’m very happy with that.
This bit of wibbling brought to you by the need to spend this afternoon proctoring the final exam for my intro physics class, which is brain-meltingly boring. If you enjoy this kind of thing, here’s a button:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
Thanks for the photo of Perry House. I spent a few happy years there.
If you do not count working to help pay the bills as "extracurricular" I'd say for for my self and children, "extracurricular definitely came in second.