Make college your 'Walden Pond'

I’m a wannabe naturalist. Since the AP biology exam, my interaction with science has been limited to watching the changing seasons. For example, I tried to recall basic photosynthesis vocabulary such as “thylakoid membrane” and “Calvin cycle” when fragile green leaves flushed out of the trees this spring. Sadly, their names were about all I remembered.

In this spirit of scientific amateurism, I found myself observing squirrels last weekend. As I walked through the forest behind my parents’ house, I noticed that the snap of a twig or the muddy squishing of approaching shoes sends them bounding toward the nearest tree.

Though I have no hard data to support my assertion, I have a suspicion that the squirrels’ behavior seemed remarkable because it contrasts so radically with what I have come to expect squirrels to do: sit complacently on the ground and eat.

Bloomington’s resident squirrels are arguably tamer than the average house pet. I sometimes worry about accidentally kicking one that hesitates too long on a sidewalk.
However, I wonder if giving the squirrels an occasional fright might be beneficial. Surrounded by benevolent humans, our Sciurus carolinensis population has unlearned its fear of Homo sapiens.

Campus living changes humans, too. All too often, students follow the same path as the squirrels. By parents’ and professors’ estimation, and even by our own admission, many undergraduates are slothful, downright lazy people. Like squirrels, living in walking distance of campus rarely requires that we exert ourselves physically. What’s more, many of us are happy to turn our brains off any time a holiday such as Little 500 gives us an excuse to do so.

The extent to which colleges are responsible for changing their lax atmosphere, and the extent to which it’s even a problem, is a subject much debated.

On April 27, Mark C. Taylor wrote of the need to change universities’ “mass-production model” in a New York Times op-ed. Though Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, singled out the structure of graduate education, his vision for a new university structure would impact undergraduates as well.

One change Taylor suggested, for example, is abolishing current departments such as philosophy and biology and replacing them with “problem-focused programs” such as language, space, time, media, money and water. Another would train graduate students to find jobs outside academia.

In short, these changes center around an oft-expressed need to “make education more relevant” to a jobs-based economy. While I’m unconvinced that higher education would be improved by catering to capitalism’s needs, Taylor and others have a point.

It’s true that much of students’ laziness is a product of the prevailing attitude that college is a special time that doesn’t burden us with the full responsibilities of adulthood. But I would argue that making education an extension of the frequently hectic and cutthroat professional world isn’t a satisfactory solution.

Rather than abolishing universities’ unique environment, education will be made more
relevant when individual students fully realize the privileges of studying in a tranquil environment where even the squirrels are fat.