You know what I just did? I just went into The Chronicle archives and read, in two sittings, every single column printed this year. No joke. It took me six hours.
Why would I do such a thing? Well, for one, I've always considered myself something of a Christ figure, and I kinda get off on the idea of singlehandedly taking on the entire Duke community's-Chronicle-related suffering. But more to the point, I was doing research.
I was hunting for generalizations--I wanted to tabulate every blanket statement made about Duke students this year. I found a grand total of 208, which means that generalizations come at a rate of a little more than one every column. And that kind of frequency suggests that the editorial page is pretty central to our collective identity, or at least wants to be--it's where Dukies tell Dukies who they are.
So what exactly constitutes a generalization? I define it as any sweeping assertion of the type "Duke students are." Here's a typical, if slightly dramatic, one from last semester: we have "practical, problem-solving mind honed by these pre-professional educations. We know how to diagnose, to troubleshoot, to analyze and to label. We know how to purge or exile things that we have called problematic. We know how to pursue perfection. But many of us don't know how to live without it. Maybe that's why nobody here falls in love."
I think you get the idea: Duke students work too hard, Duke students are too career-driven, Duke students are perfectionists, Duke students can't throw a decent party, et cetera. In fact, generalizations fall quite neatly into categories: about a quarter of those I recorded had to do with Effortless Perfection; over half were criticisms of how we socialize; most of the rest were blanket statements on greeks.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with generalizations per se. They can be helpful or unhelpful, founded or unfounded. Some columnists may just have their ears pressed more closely to the ground than the rest of us. In fact, you could say that social commentary is the art of intelligent generalizations.
The real distinction has to do with insight: Does a generalization tell us something new about ourselves? Here's a really good one, from Dostoevsky: "To a commonplace man of limited intellect, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving."
Unfortunately, Dostoevsky doesn't write for The Chronicle. And even more unfortunately, our generalizations, mine included, tend toward the wildly unoriginal. And when generalizations start repeating themselves, we get in trouble. We find ourselves in the editorial echo chamber--assertions cycle through until they become facts, and then they start to influence our behavior and then they reappear in The Chronicle.
After all, how do we know what we know about Duke? How do we know that the administration's out to get us, or that we're all so goddamn upwardly-mobile? I doubt it's because we've considered the statistics. After all, this is a particularly tough place to get a read on: too big for any one person to comprehend as a whole, too small to stay static for long.
Where do we get our opinions, then? I'd be willing to bet that they derive mostly from anecdotal evidence and from our friends' opinions (and Lord knows where they got them). When it comes to weighing each data point or deciding between conflicting nuggets of truth, it's often simply a matter of preference. I think we'd rather have our identity put us at ease in the world than conform to the world. So our opinions' first job is to define our relation to the Ivies and the second-tiers, to high school and real life and so on. Our identity may be based in the facts, but it's also highly selective. The way it turns out on the editorial page is, on some level, our choice.
So by all means let's do whatever we can about whatever we think ails us, be it self-segregation, or anti-intellectualism, or the dreaded EP. But let's also be skeptics. Let's watch out for editorially-imposed definitions. Let's be sure to ask why we're so sure. A little epistemology never hurt anybody.
That's what I decided as I went backwards through the archives, past DCU and Saturday Night and Sigma Chi in reverse, taking notes with my little golf pencil. I found this on Aug. 26, way back when, from Jonathan Ross:
"Unfortunately, at the end of every year, it seems like the same problems exist, the same complaints are made, the same factors blamed, the same bitter columns written in the last few Chronicles of the year."
Damn straight. The Chronicle has been mumbling to itself for a long time.
Rob Goodman is a Trinity junior. His column appears every other Wednesday.
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