ENG122 Dvc Diablo Valley College College Pressures Response Compare/contrast the challenges that the students face in each text, using quotes to support yo

ENG122 Dvc Diablo Valley College College Pressures Response Compare/contrast the challenges that the students face in each text, using quotes to support your claims. 500 words minimum. 1
COLLEGE PRESSURES — William Zinsser
An Article from The Norton Reader, Norton-Simon Publishing, 1978
Dear Carlos: I desperately need a dean’s excuse for my chem midterm which will
begin in about 1 hour. All I can say is that I totally blew it this week. I’ve fallen
incredibly, inconceivably behind.
Carlos: Help! I’m anxious to hear from you. I’ll be in my room and won’t leave it until
I hear from you. Tomorrow is the last day for …….
Carlos: I left town because I started bugging out again. I stayed up all night to finish a
take-home make-up exam and am typing it to hand in on the 10th. It was due on the
5th. P.S. I’m going to the dentist. Pain is pretty bad.
Carlos: Probably by Friday I’ll be able to get back to my studies. Right now I’m going
to take a long walk. This whole thing has taken a lot out of me.
Carlos: I’m really up the proverbial creek. The problem is I really bombed the history
final. Since I need that course for my major I ….
Carlos: Here follows a tale of woe. I went home this weekend, had to help my Mom,
and caught a fever so didn’t have much time to study. My professor …..
Carlos: Aargh!! Trouble. Nothing original but everything’s piling up at once. To be
brief, my job interview …..
Hey Carlos, good news! I’ve got mononucleosis.
Who are these wretched supplicants, scribbling notes so laden with anxiety, seeking
such miracles of postponement and balm? They are men and women who belong to
Branford College, one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale University, and the
messages are just a few of the hundreds that they left for their dean, Carlos Hortas -often slipped under his door at 4 a.m. — last year.
But students like the ones who wrote those notes can also be found on campuses from
coast to coast — especially in New England, and at many other private colleges across
the country that have high academic standards and highly motivated students. Nobody
could doubt that the notes are real. In their urgency and their gallows humor they are
authentic voices of a generation that is panicky to succeed.
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My own connection with the message writers is that I am master of Branford College.
I live in its Gothic quadrangle and know the students well. (We have 485 of them.) I
am privy to their hopes and fears — and also to their stereo music and their piercing
cries in the dead of night (“Does anybody ca-a-are?”). If they went to Carlos to ask
how to get through tomorrow, they come to me to ask how to get through the rest of
their lives.
Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have
more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs,
change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don’t want to hear such
liberating news. They want a map — right now — that they can follow unswervingly to
career security, financial security, social security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.
What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future. I wish
them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and
not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip
and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.
My wish, of course, is naive. One of the few rights that America does not proclaim is
the right to fail. Achievement is the national god, venerated in our media — the million
dollar athlete, the wealthy executive — and the glorified in our praise of possessions.
In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.
I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure,
parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around
for villians — to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for
assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, the students
for driving themselves too hard. But there are are no villians, only victims.
“In the late 1960’s,” one dean told me, “the typical question that I got from students
was, ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world?’ or ‘How can I make a
contribution?’ Today it’s, ‘Do you think it would look better for getting into law school
if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of
them?’ Many other deans confirmed this pattern. One said, “They’re trying to find an
edge — the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are
about equal.” Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript has become a sacred
document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than
how one appears in person. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though,
in Yale’s official system of grading, A means “excellent” and B means “very good.”
Today, looking very good is no longer enough, especially for students who hope to go
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on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools
will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they
will make a lot of money. They also know that the odds are harsh, Yale Law School,
for instance, matriculates 170 students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard
enrolls 550 from a pool of 7,000.
It’s all very well for those of us who write letters of recommendation for our students
to stress the qualities of humanity that will make them good lawyers or doctors. And
it’s nice to think that admission officers are really reading our letters and looking for
the extra dimension of commitment or concern. Still, it would be hard for a student
not to visualize these officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with A’s that they
regard a B as positively shameful.
The pressure is almost as heavy on students who just want to graduate and get a job.
Long gone are the days of the “gentlemen’s C,” when students journeyed through
college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of courses — music, art,
philosophy, classics, anthropology, poetry, religion — that would send them out as
liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would employ graduates
who have this range and curiousity rather than those who narrowly purused safe
subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds exhilarate
me. I like to hear the play of their ideas. I don’t know if they are getting A’s or C’s, and
I don’t care. I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find
satisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They can’t.
Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at
most private colleges now comes to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. This
might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But they are equally battered
by inflation. Tuition covers only 60% of what it costs to educate a student, and
ordinarily the remainder comes from what colleges receive in endowments, grants,
and gifts. Now the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs higher every
year, of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up. Insurance is up. Postage is up.
Health premium costs are up. Everything is up. Deficits are up. We are witnessing in
America the creation of a brotherhood of paupers — colleges, parents and students,
joined by the common bond of debt.
Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part-time at college and fulltime during the summer, to accrue $5,000 in loans after four years — loans that he
must start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted at commencement to go
forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth. How could he not feel
under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used
“he,” incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no less pressure to
justify their expensive education to themsleves, their parents, and society. In fact, they
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are probably under more pressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped
to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society hasn’t yet caught up with
that fact.
Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply
intertwined.
I see many students taking pre-medical courses with joyless tenacity. They go off to
their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them in
other corners of their life as cheerful people.
“Do you want to go to medical school?” I ask them.
“I guess so,” they say, without conviction, or “Not really.”
“Then why are you going?”
“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They’re paying all this money and …”
Poor students, poor parents. They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and
duty and guilt. The parents mean well; they are trying to steer their sons and daughters
toward a secure future. But the sons and daughters want to major in history or classics
or philosophy — subjects with no “practical” value. Where’s the payoff on the
humanities? It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do,
indeed, pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history
and classics — an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see
events in perspective — are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or
almost any general field. Still, many thaters would rather put their money on courses
that point toward a specific profession — courses that are pre-law, pre-medical, prebusiness, or as I sometimes put it, “pre-rich.”
But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels
obligated to fulfill their parents’ expectations; after all, their parents are older and
presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their
parents are not right for them.
I know a student who wants to be an artist. She is very obviously an artist and will be
a good one — she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she is
growing as a well-rounded person and taking humanistic subjects that will enrich the
inner resources out of which her art will grow. But her father is strongly opposed. He
thinks that an artist is a “dumb” thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to please
everybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takes some of the
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“dumb” courses her father wants her to take — at least they are dumb courses for her.
She is a free spirit on a campus of tense students — no small achievement in itself -she deserves to follow her muse.
Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at
the beginning of freshman year.
“I had a freshman student I’ll call Linda, ” one dean told me, “who came in and said
she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter
and studied all the time. I couldn’t tell her that Barabra had come in two hours earlier
to say the same thing about Linda.”
The story is almost funny — except that it’s not. It’s symptomatic of all the pressures
put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and
doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the
library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish
they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clack of
typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are
approaching and papers are due : “Will I get everything done?”
Probably they won’t. They will get sick. They will get “blocked”. They will sleep.
They will oversleep. They will bug out. Hey Carlos, Help!
Part of the problem is that they do more than they are expected to do. A professor will
assign five-page papers. Several students will start writing ten-page papers, and a few
will raise the ante to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the
assignment.
“Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately
overexerting,” one dean points out, “it’s just bad for everybody. When a teacher gets
more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be
perceived as not doing well. The tactic works, psychologically.”
Why can’t the professor just cut back and not accept longer papers? He can and he
probably will. But by then the term will be half over and the damage done. Grade
fever is highly contagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor’s main
concern is with his course. He knows his students only in relation to the course and
doesn’t know that they are also overexerting in their other courses. Nor is it really his
business. He didn’t sign up for dealing with the student as a whole person and with all
the emotional baggage the student brought from home. That’s what deans, masters,
chaplains, and psychiatrists are for.
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To some extent this is nothing new: a certain number of professors have always been
self-contained islands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with books than
with people. But the new pauperism has widened the gap still further, for professors
who actually like to spend time with students don’t have as much time to spend. They
also are overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to
perish, hanging by their fingernails onto a shrinking profession. If they are old and
tenured, they are buried under the duties of administering departments — as
departmental chairmen or members of committees — that have been thinned out by the
budgetary axe.
Ultimately it will be the student’s own business to break the circles in which they are
trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their
classmates’ fears. They must be jolted into believing in themselves as unique men and
women who have the power to shape their own future.
“Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience,” says Carlos Horta.
“College should be open-ended; at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead,
students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along,
it’s almost as if they think that the country has been codified in the type of jobs that
exist — that they’ve got to fit into certain slots. Therefore, fit into the best-paying slot.”
“They ought to take chances. Not taking chances will lead to a life of colorless
mediocrity. They’ll be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.”
I have painted too drab a portrait of today’s students, making them seem a solemn lot.
That is only half of their story: if they were so dreary I wouldn’t so thoroughly enjoy
their company. The other half is that they are easy to like. They are quick to laugh and
to offer friendship. They are not introverts. They are unusually kind and are more
considerate of one another than any student generation I have known.
Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extra-curricular
activities. On the contrary, they juggle their crowded hours to play on a variety of
teams, peform with musical and dramatic groups, and write for campus publications.
But this in turn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices.
Academically, they have 1,300 courses to select from; outside class they have to
decide how much spare time they can spare and how to spend it.
This means that they engage in fewer extracurricular pursuits than their predecessors
did. If they want to row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminate one;
in the ’60’s they would have done both. They also tend to choose activities that are
self-limiting. Drama, for instance, is flourishing in all twelve of Yale’s residential
colleges as it never has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions — as
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actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians — with a dedication to create the best
possible play, knowing that the day will come when the run will end and they can get
back to their studies.
They also can’t afford to be the willing slave for organizations like the Yale Daily
News. Last spring at the one hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper whose past
chairmen include such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster,
and William F. Buckley, Jr. — much was made of the fact that the editorial staff used
to be small and totally committed and that “newsies” routinely worked fifty hours a
week. In effect they belonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at
Yale. Today’s student will write one or two articles a week, when he can, and he
defines himself as a student. I’ve never heard the word Newsie except at the banquet.
If I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is
largely ignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out and play, it’s
because that’s where the crunch is, not only at Yale but throughout American
education. It’s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing
a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.
I tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead — that each of them is a
different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I
tell them that change is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers
closed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have
achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my
students during the year. They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of
magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business
executives, Broadway producers, artists, writers, economists, photographers,
scientists, historians — a mixed bag of achievers.
I ask them to say a few words about how they got started. The students assume that
they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they
wanted to do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitious route,
to their surprise, after many detours. The students are startled. They can hardly
conceive of a career that was not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the
hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.

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