I've been a little weary of my position in the University as of late. It's not only that I'm a senior, or that I still haven't adapted to the 'social life' at PSU, but it's really more a question of the ethics of me just being here.
I don't have any scholarships, so I've been working a couple of jobs to keep up with loans and books and the loans I don't get, and still I manage to attend every class, plus featured lectures, and I somehow find myself in the libraries every week seeking out that forgotten book or score. And lest we not forget clubs and performances. My issue comes from the fact that I use up a lot of the University's resources like a ravenous beast. And I'm learning a lot, and doing a lot, but for what? As a composer, my job is horribly abstract, as I've discussed before.
The real ethical issue comes to play when we consider who pays for these resources. The kid that sits to the right of me in
English, who goes to every football game and walks into class every morning hung-over,
he pays for these resources. The group
that sits behind me in CompSci who complain about listening to a lecture about
programming macros instead of keeping up with
And how do I justify this? I'm leeching off tens of thousands of students who are a lot like me (in terms of where we are in our lives and academic backgrounds). I feel that as a student body, we tend to forget that everyone in that student body is essentially pursuing the same thing: education. Some form of higher learning, if for nothing else, to leave college with the know-how to obtain a decent job. Despite this, the whole community feeling that should be common at a university just doesn't appear and is replaced by this apathy toward the university they pay to support.
Don't get me wrong.
There's an amazingly powerful Liberal Arts education to be found at
And in way, this leads into the core idea of this blogging prototype. By blogging like this, we create a social atmosphere that, for some reason, doesn't pervade much on campus. I see Dean Brady's vision for the Schreyer's students blogging as applying to the whole campus. Imagine thousands of students actively engaged in each other's developments and discoveries. Networking will no longer be about who you are, but what you do, which is at the very least just as much of who you are as, say, your name and that picture of you doing a keg-stand.
I think having the university blog will turn the campus into
a network of ideas and active thought.
And that's what a university, especially one as important as
And this is found at Scheyer's. As a junior-gate scholar and a resident of South Halls, however, I remain withdrawn from that atmosphere, for better or worse. With so much going on around campus, however, I feel like this pursuit ought to (and to some degree, is) shared by everyone, students, grads, and faculty alike.
That's an abstract way to look at our academic institution, but I guess that's my job. To try to initiate some change or at least try to push those ideas that could make a notable impact. But I'm still uneasy about leeching. Please take advantage of the money you spend here. There's more than enough resources here to spare.
I apologize if that came off egotistical.
Ryan - not egotistical, but I wouldn't say that you are leeching off of those students any more than students on scholarship are leeching off of you (they aren't). What is really happening is that you are taking advantage of everything the university has to offer and others not only aren't taking advantage of it (it is available to them as well) but they often aren't even aware of what is here.