Dear first years,
Why did you pick Bowdoin in the first place? If you really think about it and try to recollect your initial inclinations, you'd admit there was something seductive about the idea of a liberal arts education. The idea of such an education was vague, and it still is, but you were told by your admissions counselor or parents what it was and something about that appealed to you.
It is possible you still hold out hopes of enjoying the rapture of intense intellectual questioning and political arguments outside class. There is still a hope that the endless conversations about poetry, literature, and philosophy lacking in high school have a home here, but you are beginning to wonder whether those hopes are delusional fantasies.
As many of you settle into life in one of Bowdoin's clubs, teams, hallway units, groups, or academic departments, some of you may be frustrated with the lack of intellectual engagement here. Many of you will conform and nestle yourself into a social unit that is hostile to literary allusion, thought experiments, and public displays of erudition (PDE), but for a few of you, there will be a tacit and lingering, yet silent, rebellion against what you see as a sterile intellectual culture incapable of giving birth to anything that could even come close to resembling our inherited standards of genius.
In that rebellion, you would be partially right and partially wrong. You are right to detect a certain flaccidity and flatness—a lack of controversy, philosophic courage, and political engagement at Bowdoin that is odd for a culture that has previously been at the forefront of American poetry, anti-war protests, and the civil rights cultural and philosophical transformations.
But you are wrong when you then go and say that Bowdoin is not an intellectual place and start engaging in conservative diatribes about the dark phantoms of "political correctness" or liberal diatribes about your speech being suppressed by the wicked forces of capitalism.
We do have an intellectual culture here but it can only maintain itself if you guys bring forth your original ideals and commit yourself to engaging our school in the kind of debate that can bridge the widening divide between our academic and social lives. Many of the upperclassmen have already settled into their ways; the rejuvenation of our intellectual culture is in your hands, and here are a few suggestions:
1. Submit something. Q, Curia, the Quill and the Orient are all great publications at the College staffed by thoughtful people who are hungry to fill their pages with your nuanced cultural criticism or poetry.
2. Engage in the quarrel between religion and secularism. The titanic controversy between those who think we'd be better off without religion and those who think we absolutely need to keep it has only begun to surface. To the Catholic Student Union, the Christian Fellowship, Muslim students, and Hillel—are you really going to let the school get away with building a "center for the common good" in the church? Can a "religion of the common good" really replace your religions? Secularists—are you really going to let the rise of evangelical Protestantism on both the left and right in American politics go unnoticed?
3. Consider the question of unrivaled neoliberalism. Now that neoliberalism is sanctioned by one of the most charismatic political leaders in world history, does that make dissenters a wicked and false resistance to the True and Final Philosophy? The only way to resist this neoliberal homogeneity is for communitarians, libertarians, leftists, anarchists, religionists, radical feminists, and conservatives to come out from their hiding and start bringing their arguments to the public. Genuine leftists—what do you think about America's foreign policy from 1967-2008? Conservatives—with the possibility of a 'new new deal' in mind, do you still believe that socialism and freedom are incompatible? Is anyone willing to verbally fight to make Bowdoin students take these political alternatives seriously, even if it makes him a pariah?
4. Follow the great debate about sexual liberation. It is up to our generation to decide whether there are any sexual mores we would like to transmit to future Americans. While responsible traditionalists could make the case that we are the most sexually decadent culture in world history, and that this poses a threat to western civilization, the social justice enthusiasts think the liberationist project still has miles to go as they rethink gender, fight repression, and re-envision queerness for the 21st century. As the country is at cultural war over these issues, we can learn something from both sides.
5. Make use of office hours and attend lectures. Some of you might be scared, but if you talk to your professors, you will be astonished—it is seriously as if there is a whole cabal of humans here who somehow find gratification in promoting our intellectual development. If you haven't noticed, most of our professors probably do not pray, but if they did, they would pray for a more vibrant intellectual culture here; and they can give you ideas about how to make that happen. As for the public lectures, they are like our ad-hoc coffee houses. After the speaker finishes, don't leave! This is a good place for people interested in genuine conversation and the shared experience of a speaker gives you some common ground to work with.
With questions about the nation-state, religion, financial crisis, Middle East, recent scientific discoveries, rise of China, suffering in Africa, technological revolutions, European unity, sexuality, and the merits of postmodernism vibrating in the minds of intellectuals and academics all over the world, we must resist the "post-intellectual" urge inside telling us that there is nothing calling forth the kind of scholastic brilliance and intellectual rigor that animated the 20th century.
Class of 2012, I dare you to make Bowdoin conform to your ideals of a good liberal arts culture, rather than conforming yourself to a less-than-ideal intellectual culture that does not satisfy the longings that originally brought you miles away from home to this commune of inquiry in Bumblebee, Maine.
Ross Jacobs is a member of the Class of 2010.