Back in the day

I recently encountered a friend in the Regulator Bookstore who had just sent his son off to college. He told me a revealing story. "I have always told my children that it is better to fail than to lie or cheat. Imagine my surprise when looking through an old college diary, I realized that I had both lied and cheated on more than one occasion, and what most surprised me was that I had absolutely no memory of having done so." I think almost every parent has found him or herself caught in similar embarrassing contradictions, even though few of us have the strength to admit it.

While useful and very well intended, the current efforts to improve campus culture in the wake of the lacrosse case often seem to me to have a similar element of amnesia about them. The complaints are familiar: "Students drink too much!" "They're not serious enough about their studies!" "They don't really love ideas?" "They are not committed enough!" And especially, "Athletes get away with murder!" Many of us on the faculty grew up or came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the light of nostalgia we remember our high-intentioned political activism, the fight for civil rights, the protests against the war, our dedication to making the world a better place-on occasion we even talk about all of this with our students-but few of us recount those horrible Sunday mornings, the often embarrassing and at times dangerous things that not we (no it couldn't have been us) but our friends, or other students we knew did. I sometimes think that like my friend we have forgotten what we were like when we were that age.

But many of us have been parents and to our students we seem often so parentlike that they can hardly believe that we were once like them ("Like us, those old farts; it can't be true!) Ah, but it is true, and in many ways we are still more similar to our students than either we, or they, would like to admit. It is this that makes it difficult for us to be more than phantom judges and moral exemplars for our students. Better simply to admit that we were not so different "back in the day." Like old soldiers amid a group of civilians we save our war stories for one another. Perhaps we would all be better friends if we spoke with greater candor. Perhaps we could shake off the false cloak of in loco parentis that fits us so poorly and wrap ourselves in in loco amicus. Perhaps we could be friends with our students and speak to them not only from the podium, but across a table with a few (root, it has to be root) beers.

Then we might tell them about our mistakes and errors of judgment, about the nights we got carried away (in more ways that one), about our foolishness and stupidity. It might make it easier for them to hear our advice. A colleague of mine is fond of remembering one of her college friends who accidentally articulated what seems like a reasonable moral goal for undergraduate life: Be moderate in your excess. This is good advice. Being in college and young and free is an excessive time. Life overflows. A young body soon turns that horrible Sunday into a tolerable Monday (unlike older bodies that take a bit and sometimes more than a bit longer to recuperate). Vitality carries the young through and over their mistakes, and their idiocy. Usually.

But not always. And that is an important point. Excess does not moderate itself without some planning and help. Especially when we are surrounded only by others who are similarly excessive. Here the presence of some sympathetic adults can actually be useful, older students, RAs, coaches, faculty in residence and even deans who are there not to enforce the rules, or be "fun police," but to make sure that fun does not become dangerous and (more than moderately) destructive.

So as we begin to consider what can be done to improve undergraduate life at Duke, let's not forget who we are and were. Students will continue to be excessive. This is an old, old story going back the riots in medieval university towns between excessively drinking and womanizing students (many future clerics) and townsfolk, passing from generation to generation (including, for example, the great German philosopher Hegel who was nearly kicked out of school for consuming too much Madeira and pursuing too many late night adventures), down to our own raucous but so much more permissive time. I refer, of course, not to today but to the 1960s, before AIDS, herpes, the 21-year-old drinking age put a crimp in the youthful style, and drove desire underground, or at least off campus.

Let's also not forget who our students are. Most of them will not follow in our footsteps but find pathways of their own that are less bookish and less intellectual but not for that reason less valuable or admirable. Students work hard, even if they don't work as hard as we would like. Not surprisingly, they work harder at the things that are more meaningful for their future lives than the things that are only meaningful for us.

Some are made better and more well rounded by our requirements, others simply figure out how to get by in those subjects that seem merely tangential to their lives. Students at times are also immoderate in their excess-some all-too-often-and we can do something to influence that, but not from the podium or by establishing new rules, or writing new codes of behavior and then like Rousseau's lawgiver departing the scene. We can in other words make a difference if we can be better friends to our students. This is more difficult than being absentee parents, but also more effective.