Sarah Lawrence College: where the men are women and the women wear nothing but mohawks. We commonly saw boys in lipstick and dresses smoking weed on the North Lawn or girls trotting about clad only in a handful of oak leaves taped to their bodies. They would gather at night, to drink and smoke and discuss hegemony or Foucault. Sarah Lawrence seemed to be located somewhere on the earth’s fringe, far away from everything but itself. Very few things existed except ourselves: no ethics, no objectivity, no conventions, no gods, no gender, no government. The world was ours to examine under the microscope and interpret as we saw fit—to dissect, to denounce, to decorate. The school took care to smash our presuppositions and beliefs from the colossal cornerstones they were into little heaps of rubble and sentiment; then they fed us. We simply ate books and research and art, gorged ourselves until we could hardly move, intense curiosity walled in by extreme apathy. Most sat, stagnant, and stewed in their formulas and philosophies. Few mastered the art of digestion: turning theory into practice, knowledge into action. Essentially, our studies were gluttony.
Francis Bacon named three purposes for study: delight, ornament, and ability. Sarah Lawrence indulged in the first two and neglected the latter almost entirely. The school was decadence itself, but though my year there was scholarly bliss, such luxury can be educationally lethal. Example: one girl I often sat beside spent the entire spring semester building naked babies out of rubber and nailing them to walls. She earned top marks and I withdrew. I had intended to stay and use the resources Sarah Lawrence offered for more altruistic purposes. In the end, however, I couldn’t justify a few years of boundless intellectual indulgence and only to spend the following decades shackled by debt.
It’s high time my education had an aim. Scholarly pursuits are not merely an end, but a means to an end. Certainly one of study’s purposes is to transform the minds of its apprentices, but, ideally, the process is cyclical and the transformation mutual. Study should lead students not only to examine but also to shape their given environment, to improve, to innovate, to invent—to identify and meet the world’s ever-present needs. Make no mistake, Sarah Lawrence quilted some of its colours onto my soul; I’ve a skull full of limericks and larks I gleaned there. But I’ve pasted together my crumbled cornerstones, and though they are altered, as I stand tall on them, I am reminded that I was made to be more than an intellectual epicure. My education is not solely for my benefit and I am accountable to something greater than myself. If I am anything at all, I am willing to be challenged, instructed, prepared—disciplined and discipled. Teach me how and I’ll wash the world’s feet.
