It’s a scene that most seniors are familiar with: you’re with a few friends, chatting, having a good time, perhaps celebrating the coming of spring. A lull in the conversation comes, and one of your friends starts staring intently at his drink. After that silence lasts just a second too long, he says, prematurely nostalgic, “I’m going to miss this place.”
The mood instantly turns melancholy, and for a minute everyone stares into his drink, mumbling in agreement. Finally, someone says he just doesn’t want to think about it or that whatever, he is super excited for the real world.
With finals and then graduation uncomfortably soon, there’s a question worth asking ourselves and our peers: What have we learned in our undergraduate years at Bowdoin—four years that are promised to be the best of our lives?
I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned that high-school me was dead wrong and that I’ll use math quite a lot throughout my career.
I’ve learned about the allegory of the cave, and that I unquestionably want to see more than the shadows on the wall and that I am mystified when others do not. I’ve learned that I love studying law, legal reasoning and all the implications of the rules we write for society, and that I will probably go to law school. I’ve learned that people from all walks of life have a shared humanity and that no matter what, a person is a person, and should be treated as such.
I’ve learned that I’m not, as I believed when I arrived on campus nearly four years ago, a socialist. Instead of drifting to the left at Bowdoin, my studies, my friends and my professors have put me on a political tract much closer to Michael Bloomberg than Ralph Nader.
As living proof that you can leave Bowdoin more conservative than you went in, I would like to congratulate the National Association of Scholars and all right-wing alarmists for being so stunningly wrong about Bowdoin being a liberal indoctrination machine. To be fair, to have become more liberal than I was four years ago, I would need to wave around a copy of Mao’s “Little Red Book” and think that Russell Brand’s ravings are even a little coherent. I also didn’t exactly turn into Ronald Reagan.
I’ve learned that moral relativism has to be much more limited than many of us might like. Obviously not every society and subset of society needs to share exactly the same rules and morals, but fundamental human rights are well worth defending—even when that defense looks an awful lot like imperialism.
We are willing to label certain behaviors or practices patently wrong within our own society, and there is no reason we should not extend our analysis—carefully—beyond our borders. We’re not right about everything, however, and we must be willing to accept that and strive to improve. But we must also be willing to accept that there are certain things we are very much right about—for instance, that the right to dissent must be inalienable.
To claim that values are relative and that atrocities such as the Charlie Hebdo massacre could be excused because of cultural differences embodies a very dark form of nihilism that throws away millennia of human social progress.
Rather than waste our breath on misplaced sensitivity, we should think of what values can help humanity exist freely without fear of violent reprisal for real or imagined slights.
I’ve learned that my peers have an immense amount to teach me, and that your worldviews might be best fleshed out late at night with your roommates while you try to finish that one last piece of homework before bed. I’ve learned that columns can be written in an hour if you’re sufficiently desperate. I’ve learned to accept criticism and to give it. I’ve learned to learn by doing. I’ve learned to better appreciate all the arts and sciences and to be fascinated by disciplines about which I know little.
I’ve learned to learn at Bowdoin, and I’ll carry these four years of knowledge with me for the rest of my life.