An Open Letter to Incoming Freshmen

Dear College Freshman,

The University of Wyoming is back in session. I am happy about it because I love to teach.

But this year we begin with the backdrop of President Joe Biden’s $300 billion plan to forgive student debt. Is that decision a brilliant idea that will relieve a burdened generation? Or a terrible policy that leaves the working class footing the bill of the country’s college graduates?

That debate will rage in the so-called “public square.” Millions are already talking about it and soon so will you. I can imagine now how it will result in all manner of protests and moralizing on either side, all of which will be a waste of time.

Remember – you are here to learn how to learn, not to protest.

So, with this letter, I want to give you my perspective, albeit rather dated (I began college in 1974). I hope to impart some hard-won words of wisdom, specifically surrounding all the false choices you will face — and therefore, the challenge of living authentically on campuses where sameness has become the rule.

They say that our universities are charged with educating tomorrow’s citizens insofar as those universities are said to be the incubators of our ideas, our language, our social movements and our politics. I don’t necessarily agree. I think that you can become a citizen, perhaps even a better one, having never gone to college at all.

In the end, the value of a real education lay in learning how to make some Important Choices. Not the meaningless ones. As examples:

Your new “.edu” inbox is by now undoubtedly full of emails from administrators asking you about your preferred dining options—Are you vegan? Do you want your meals to go? Are you sure you’re not a vegan? And roommates—How do you feel about night owls? How clean do you expect your new BFF to be? Is it okay if this person smokes? And all the clubs you might join. Badminton, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Glee, Ski Racing, The ChicanX Caucus, Anime Society . . . you name it, they’ve got it.

Then, there’s your preferred pronoun. Not exactly an essential or Important Choice, but such is the college campus of today.

Or how about your dorm room? Like so many of us “first worlders,” you’ve probably spent hours on Amazon, shopping for the perfect dorm room essentials. Perhaps a beautiful duvet?

And then, once you’re on campus, you’ll have to choose your special spot in the library, your seat in the lecture hall, your on-campus gym, and your off-campus bar (with choices aplenty as to the state you want on your fake ID).

But before you devote untold hours to mapping out exactly how you think the next four years of your life will go, I want to offer you this thought:

None of those decisions really matter.

They’re not important because they’re not real. They might feel like actual choices – I know they did to me when I started school – but I have come to understand them as fake ones. They distract us all from the fact that college has become a place where students no longer make hard intellectual and moral choices; in other words, the choices that actually matter.

Beneath the surface of all those meaningless choices, whose purpose is to assert meaningless differences, is an overpowering sameness. You may have different diets and duvets, but let me warn you: In the end, you are all supposed to think the same. It will be forced upon you by an array of social forces, cues, nods, and emojis. Sometimes it’s overt. Sometimes it’s just a vibe.

I suspect it’s already familiar to many of you. It’s the lack of discussion in lecture halls because people think they think the same things or because they’re afraid to use the wrong pronoun and then get called out. It’s the rallies where people have no idea what they’re calling for and don’t care because they just want their presence to be noted, tagged, and liked. It’s the students and professors and Teaching Assistants nodding along, clapping uproariously, at all the correct platitudes that nobody bothers to unpack: Free Palestine! Defund the police! Make college free! Believe all women! (All of them? Really?)

But sometimes, unbelievably, it will be the quiet studious professor with decades of experience and accrued wisdom who, quietly, behind closed doors, acknowledges that your unpopular opinion—the one you were bold or dumb enough to give voice to in class—was actually valid, that he didn’t want to say as much in front of his students, because, you know, it’s easier to go along. (True story.)

There’s this dead white guy, Baruch Spinoza, who tells us that the only true freedom is freedom of thought. It comes from what you believe, not what you say you believe or what you look like. If Spinoza were to reappear on campus today, he’d see a lot of people with different colored hair and tattoos and piercings who insist they are “living their truth” but are, in fact, unwitting prisoners of someone else’s truth (whatever it may be).

Go ahead: Tattoo and pierce your beautiful legs, your muscled arms, your eyebrows, whatever. But please, I beg you, don’t do it to fit in.

Often, these choices are subtle. Take for example, my lifelong friends. I have exactly four of them. I’m not a weirdo. It’s just that in my lifetime, it’s come down to the four people who insisted on being free; people who have shown me, more than anyone else, what it means to stand up for something, to make a cogent argument, to listen, and possibly to admit to being wrong. These are the people whom I admire and respect and really, truly know. It is because of these four friendships that I am now inching toward old age with the knowledge that I didn’t need to be afraid of being myself. They didn’t surround themselves with like-minded people and encouraged me to avoid them as well. It was subtle encouragement, but it was real.

We had a history teacher way back in high school whose byline was, “ask many [questions and people], listen to all [the people and answers], then make-up-your-own-mind.”

While that was high school, the class was an elective. I didn’t need to take it, nor did my friends. But without question, it taught me and them how to think, how to distinguish between fake and real choices, how to find meaning in other people — and ultimately, how to make up my own mind.

In college, I was encouraged to take ethics courses as electives. I am so glad that I did. I ended up minoring in Business Ethics and in that process, learned so much about definitions of human nature. And I had to “put up” with so many of the now-accepted relativistic ideas surrounding morality. I had to learn to stand down from “putting up” with those ideas and, instead, seek first to understand what the hell they were talking about. I asked questions, listened intently, then made up my own mind.

Make sure you do that too. There will be plenty of oddball arguments made in class, some, or all of which will have your eyes rolling. But desist if you can. Ask penetrating questions, listen intently, and then … you got it … make up your own mind.

In other words: Try to escape sameness.

One other important choice my friends and I made was to go to class. Attendance matters.

First of all, you paid for it. Regardless of whether you borrowed the money (put it on a credit card), or if your parents are paying, or if you are paying for it yourself, not going to class is like paying for a hotel room you never use.

Also of consideration, and I am being snarky here, is the idea that unless you go to class, you won’t learn the subject matter. Maybe you know it all – fair enough – but what you don’t know is how your particular professor is teaching the material. You won’t learn the subtleties that come from his or her energetic lecture on that material.

Most importantly, you won’t be practicing self-discipline.

Go to class.

I certainly had opportunities to skip classes. In my days in college, the Vietnam War was the cause du jour, and plenty of classes were empty as “students” (using that term loosely) went out to protest. The war didn’t end any earlier, by the way. Meanwhile, I aced examinations that they didn’t “ace,” simply because I was in class, and they weren’t.

I kept going. Not just because my parents, who’d paid for it all, expected me to, but because I (me, myself, and I) had elected to take the class. I wasn’t about to skip class just because a bunch of idealogues were telling me what I was supposed to believe. I resisted conforming to the mob, the blob, to give in to the sameness. Discipline.

To quote a recent article,

So, as I sat in the lecture hall chair, biting my nails and tapping my foot anxiously against the floor, I debated my next course of action. If I stayed seated, I would surely be excluded from the study guides that my friends would pass around in group meetings.

I pondered getting up with everyone else and walking out of the lecture hall. If I did walk out, I told myself, I wouldn’t chant along with everyone else or clap or add to the madness. I’d simply leave class, keep my head down, and be rewarded with study guides and maybe even a Facebook “friend.” And I’d try to pretend I wasn’t ashamed of myself.

And then I thought: No way.

He was right to stay.

Please don’t become part of the reason why in America, in the 21st century, a teacher needs a bodyguard to teach class. Or a civil rights attorney to fight the inevitable complaints filed against him. Or, worse, the reason why a teacher avoids the tough stuff.

For it is the tough stuff you are here to learn about.

Stay in class. Listen, Take notes. Ask the proverbial stupid questions. Do the readings.

Yes, you must act according to your conscience—choosing to stand apart without falling apart—but please see that as the most important, real choice you will make.

Duvets don’t matter. Indeed, all the stuff of country club living that our universities offer, do not matter.

What matters is learning how to think.

Yours sincerely,

/s

Dr. Russo

August 2022