What I Told My Students on the First Day of the Semester

Photo by Ambitious Studio* | Rick Barrett on Unsplash

I began my courses this year with a question that seemed offhand and irrelevant. I gave them my name and told them that I looked forward to learning theirs, but then mumbled something about the need to get to a gym after indulging a bit too much over the holidays. Did any of them feel the same way? Of course, some nodded or smiled. I asked how many of them belonged to a gym of some kind. I made clear that I didn’t mean a fitness facility that was available to them for free: I meant something they paid for. A few put up their hands.

Then, I smiled and asked those ones how much they paid for their memberships. They smiled back, a bit uncomfortably. It was an awkward question, and perhaps they worried that I might actually join one of their gyms, and that they might awkwardly run into me during a workout, ruining their sanctuary. Most of them gave answers in the neighborhood of fifty or sixty dollars a month, but one said that she spent two hundred a month. Others gave her a look, but she held her ground, explaining that physical fitness is very important to her.

I saved her from the tension by shifting the range wildly: “Well, what would you think about joining a gym whose annual membership is forty thousand dollars a year?”

Suddenly, all eyes were on me again, but a couple of them shook their heads in silence. Was I serious? Does a gym like that exist? Where was all this going, anyway?

I continued: “I know, I know… it sounds crazy; and yes, you’d have to be very rich, or somehow be bankrolled by someone who’s very rich… but you see, this gym I’m talking about is really something special. The equipment is exceptional. The facilities are outstanding — like nothing you’ve ever seen. And the personal trainers you work with there are good enough to prepare you for the Olympics, if you set your goals that high.”

Some of them looked a bit less skeptical now, but some of them still had furrowed brows.

”And it’s even better than that,” I continued. “All aspects of your physical training are covered. In fact, many people who go to this gym quit their jobs so that they can live there full-time. They go on special diets prescribed for them. They even arrange to live at the gym complex so that they can make the very most of their training. I know, it sounds like a steep price to pay and… well, it is! But if you could afford it somehow, don’t you think it would be wonderful to devote a year of your life, or maybe a few years of your life, to taking your physical fitness to a very high level, and developing habits that would sustain you for the rest of your life?”

A few students nodded along, but still there were some doubters.

”Of course, if you’re going to pay that kind of money to join a gym, and put your career and everything else on hold, you’d have to take full advantage of your time there. Consider, for instance, one particular person who joins the gym. There she is, among the world-class equipment, surrounded by world-class trainers. But instead of lifting weights at the gym by hand, she drives in a forklift and uses it to do her exercise routines. With the help of the forklift, she can handle much higher weights than anyone else there! And while others at this amazing gym go for a run, she zips past them in her car.”

The students shook their heads and scoffed.

”But look at it from her side,” I smiled. “She says, ‘We’re living in an age when technology can help us do whatever we want to do. Why not make the work easier? Why strain yourself? And in real life, I’m going to have a car to drive around in. Why don’t I get used to driving it here? I’ll be better prepared for today’s world, and the world of tomorrow!’ Now, what do you think? Has she got a point there? Is she approaching the thing intelligently? Or… do you think she’s acting stupidly?”

Of course, this question was what many of them were waiting for. They were dying to denounce her as an idiot, and nearly everyone nodded along when one of them did. She did a great job of explaining just what was wrong with this approach.

”All right, fair enough” I said. “But let me tell you about another person who joined that same gym — and, yes, he is paying forty thousand dollars a year for it. He has big dreams of becoming a professional football player. As he sees it, joining this special gym is an investment in that future. Everything for him comes down to reports on his activity, and flattering letters from the personal trainers. These trainers, you see, are respected far and wide for being at the top of their profession. As this guy sees it, if he can come out of his years at the gym with great reviews from the trainers there, he’ll have a guaranteed ticket to success as a professional athlete — and the money he’ll make then will be worth the investment he’s making in his future now. So, you see, he stays keenly focused on impressing people, and making it seem that he is working hard and developing as an athlete. In case that doesn’t work, he plans to use emotional manipulation or even threats to get the trainers to write him good letters of reference. And since seeming to be something and being that thing are very different, he considers it a waste of time to actually work out. Instead, he comes up with all sorts of clever ways of making it seem that he’s doing something he isn’t doing. Now: what about him? What do you think?”

Again, a student (following the previous one) could hardly wait to denounce this new character as a moron: “What exactly does he think is going to happen when he gets out on the field?” Etc. The students were unanimous in their disgust at the foolishness of both these characters.

At this point, I admitted to them that I don’t know of any such gym. “But I do know of a place that is very much like it, only it’s a place of mental training rather than physical training. People go there, sometimes for years, and sometimes even live on the premises while they cultivate their minds in preparation for a better life. And yes, it really does cost about forty thousand dollars a year! Do you know what I’m talking about?”

At this point, of course, some of those who hadn’t caught on before to what I was doing laughed, and said, “Here!”.

”Right! And there really are world-class experts — trainers of the mind — who will help you achieve excellence at whatever it is you want to study. For the kind of money you’re spending here — or, more likely, the kind of money your family has put aside to spend on you to have this opportunity — I think you might agree that it would be stupid indeed to give anything less than your best to your studies, your conversations with your fellow students and your professors, and everything else the university offers you. But other paths are open to you, as well — paths you have already identified, in the gym story, as idiotic. You could, instead of cultivating your mind to the best of your ability, get AI to ‘help’ you with your work, just as the person in my little story used a forklift and a car to ‘help’ her with her workouts. You could also spend your time trying to bamboozle or manipulate your professors into giving you undeserved grades, so that you can enter the world as a fraud, aping your classmates who actually become what you will merely pretend to be, and devaluing the credentials they have earned. That course of action is what the second person I told you about did. And, as you correctly pointed out, he, too, deserves your scorn.”

The silence that came at this point in both my classes told me that this little speech hit its mark with some of them. The students sat there with thoughtful expressions, and seemed receptive to what I went on to say about the purpose of university and how to succeed at it. I have come to believe more and more that most of the students who end up at university these days arrive without any idea of what it is, or what they are meant to do there. To many of them, it seems like nothing more than a continuation of high school — but a high school that offers them nothing more than a series of meaningless obstacles to ‘game’ and a set of dupes to ‘play’, in their quest to reach the finish line after putting in the least amount of work, learning nothing, and avoiding thinking altogether. They come with a cynical attitude, but they do not even seem to see it as cynical: though they devote all their energies to creating a facade of a student to hide behind, many of them no longer seem to realize that that method of handling college arose because there is a real thing, lost to their cohort today, that the facade was designed to represent.

I have no way to begin with this generation of students unless I can first get them to see that there is something that it is to be a student, as opposed to playing the superficial role of a student. I then need them to understand that the common approach of being fraudulent, or at best superficial, is an unforgivable crime against themselves: against their future successes or failures, but also against what they now have the great fortune to become, if only they will take the opportunity to do so.

This introduction to my courses feels like my best attempt so far to get this across to them.