January 21, 2000
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Periscope
Opinion
Demographically, Ithaca is an island and Cornell is a castle in the clouds. As we walk from class to class, we're lucky to see a single non-Cornellian.
We're surrounded almost exclusively by healthy, wealthy, educated people in their twenties. How often do you see children walking around, or a homeless person, or a businessman?
The artificial world that we're living in gives us a false sense of reality. It's bad enough that we all think there are a lot more Ph.D's and Jewish people in the world than there really are. But what's worse is that Cornell's comfortable isolation is sheltering us from the real world.
Part of our skewed sense of reality comes from the resort-like lifestyle that Cornell has made for us. Watch us in the libraries as we pick up the book of our choice, leaf through it, get what we need and set it down. Someone else is there to put it back for us. To sustain our learning, there are specialized workers to make our food and handle our paperwork.
As we drift off to sleep, a small army toils through the night to shovel our sidewalks and sweep up our messes, in the dark hours so they don't bother the students. We have people to polish our weight machines, to plant pretty trees, to drive the buses full of drunk bar hoppers home and to wipe up the vomit after they get off. And I do mean get off. And despite all of the princely leisure that we enjoy, we still don't have a real-world context for our studies. This hit me when I was in Boston last week. Walking down the street with a couple of friends - past panhandlers and stockbrokers - then walking through a park full of people of all ages. Reading every quote on the walls of the Holocaust memorial, then looking straight up at the Citibank Tower and John Hancock Center. This is reality. You have the bars and coffee shops just like here, but with a backdrop more thought-provoking than the sterile strip of Dryden Road.
So it hit me that every night we hit the books without any cues as to what we are working for. Our landscape is purged of all reminders that there's a world out there that needs fixing. Our courses lose meaning - psych and social science textbooks end up sounding like fairy tales about a land far far away, because we're never exposed to the people and organizations they're talking about.
There are no sick people in sight to inspire our pre-meds, and no dysfunctional structures to remind our pre-laws that the world needs people like them. We are safely tucked between gorges in a world where everything is clean and efficient, too far away to observe any realistic parts of human civilization.
With the outside completely occluded, we lose all perspective. Our made-for-us environment and Puritan workload make us completely self-absorbed. We perceive competition only against the other elite - everybody's smart and talented and reasonably attractive, which leaves a lot of remarkable people feeling average or even inadequate.
The worst effect of our seclusion is that we are shielded from any concept of adult life. The nebulous world beyond college is not readily observeable on our campus. We haven't been sharing the sidewalks with people that have the jobs we're considering. No wonder half our seniors have no clue of what they really want to do. Unlike our urban counterparts, we aren't reminded of the relevance of our field of study on a daily basis. And we haven't seen a family in four years.
College is supposedly where we start figuring out how we fit into the world. This is difficult at Cornell, since the world is not immediately visible. This means we've got to adapt like cacti to soak up the trickle of reality that makes its way through the cracks of the tower. Let's find some sources of relief.
The libraries get the New York Times and a ton of other useful windows to the world that we can browse for free. Going abroad for a semester, taking advantage of an internship or co-op opportunity can give us the worldly perspective that Cornell does not. And it would be great if the student body got their heads out of the clouds and turned their eyes (and not their noses) upon the city below.
Downtown Ithaca is probably the closest thing to the real world that we'll find for 100 miles. Get down there to shop, at least for a change of scenery. Students can also get experience with different socioeconomic or age groups by volunteering at an elementary school, GIAC, Southside, the Women's Community Building, IthacaCare or Kendal.
The weekly pilgrimage to SuperWegmans only provides a dose of surreality. Interaction and direct involvement are what cures the jadedness. Our minds are grumbling like hungry stomachs, and like good foragers, we must gobble up any resources that we can find in our immediate area.
As I walk across the manicured grass of the Plantations with my girlfriend, we enjoy the tranquil beauty that has made Cornell such a perfect place to learn and to live over the last four years. We're about to leave this remote space station and its protective bubble. Outside awaits trauma and unpredictable fluctuations, but it also means a life of higher amplitude, more stimulation, and finally, a genuine dose of reality.
Nathan Wilson is a graduate student in the College of Engineering. The North Façade appears every Monday.
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