The Bloomington Exodus

Backseats jammed with clothes, suitcases and other rudiments of the transportable life testify to the beginning of the annual emigration.

Parking lots have already emptied to half their capacity ­— coffee houses and other homework haunts have become relatively vacant.

How do they manage it?

When writing a deluge of papers and preparing for final exams, one naturally wants to know what students have such amazing schedules that they need not work during the month of May.

Yet emigration is foremost an emotionally evocative annual moment.

Packing, stacking and carrying boxes can function as a delightfully physical contrast to the mental exercise of cramming one’s brain with forgettable facts for final exams.

At least in part, then, leaving Bloomington can be a joyous exodus.

I imagine that this captures the perspective of real Bloomington residents fairly well.

After the trashing of Bloomington during Little 500, the lack of students must be a welcome quiet.

But from a student’s point of view, this yearly phenomenon is something far more nuanced.

I, for one, don’t think “good riddance” when parents descend to cart away furniture and exchange classrooms for four months of our own design.

I purposely refrain from using the loaded, but often applied, word “freedom” to describe these four months of potentially non-scholastic     activities.

For one, it seems utterly false to say that obtaining a liberal education, which is ideally the expansion of the mind, compromises the individual’s freedom. To be sure, the semester imposes a number of serious constraints on our time.

Yet if we really think there is any value in our education, if we plan, for example, to return to campus in August, it seems that “freedom” leaves much to be desired as the word we use to describe our departure.

Furthermore, the summer months have acquired their own structure.

Few would truly want to return to the summer life of an elementary schooler, lacking any sort of structure for months.

Our generation’s use of internships and community service to fill what would otherwise be empty time has been much praised as efficient and self-motivated.

Moreover, what one does during the summer has become not an inconsequential way to pass time but rather an efficient manner of dividing and labeling people’s futures.

Do you want a career in public service? Plan to spend some time gaining experience in D.C.

Do you want to live close to home? Reaffirm relations with family and community members with community service projects in your hometown.

Perhaps what people intend to say when they refer to summer as a sort of “freedom” is that it is a short-lived glimpse of their futures.

Quite poignantly, witnessing other students’ emigration from Bloomington is a reminder of the transience of life as a student.

Annual moves foreshadow one’s own permanent departure from the college town.

It seems to me that it is the very unfixed, flexible nature of the life of a university student that might be appropriately called “freedom.” An extended break from the classroom to travel, intern and work complements humanistic growth in the classroom.

University life promotes freedom through diversity.


E-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu