What I learned at Yale

Bastard Hat
    By David Auerbach

Gaze upon my smug visage above the headline and behold my shocking reflections on a life at Yale gone horribly wrong. A failure on my part to seek mental hygiene at UHS and receive an appropriate dose of therapy has left me fully cognizant of lessons better not to have learned, and now I will broadcast my screed to an audience of one.

Or not. After two-and-a-half years writing for this esteemed rag, you'll forgive me if I finally indulge in that most-unread of journalistic forms, the personal essay. Excuse me if I don't amuse with acrobatic flights of hyperbole and derision. Anything I write will seem tame in comparison to some of the reactionary doggerel that has made its way into print lately, so I'll have to settle on keen observation and the authority of experience to carry me through this one. Those of you without faith can stop reading now, or at least skip the next three paragraphs, because there's a joke after that.

It's been said that you've gotten your money's worth at college if by the end of your senior year you realize what a fool you were as a freshman. (And if you don't, you go to grad school.) That lesson might as well be that you've finally learned when to keep your mouth shut. From drunken midnight revelries to political rallies to humanities seminars, college has been one of the most willfully loud places I have ever been; a barrage of self-aggrandizing stump speeches set to drown out all comers as well as the greater apathy. And why not? The first lesson of college is that there's simply not enough attention to go around, so you're going to have to clamor for it. Soon enough, you either find that you are one of the brethren, or else that the road to Damascus does not pass by your dorm room. But there's no need to shout--it matters less than it used to.

Noted provocateur Alex Zubatov, PC '97, ended his last Herald column by calling Yale the top level of American aristocracy and asking that we act the part. Of course, he went to Harvard Law, while I'm leaving the ivory tower for the silicon tower. Many others are following the Pied Piper of Investment Banking into 80-hour work weeks and 100 percent bonuses. Zubatov, I'm afraid, enjoyed pretending that he still existed in an era of intellectual elitism. It's not just a marginal activity that for-profit colleges are starting up and that tenure now only guarantees a job and not a salary at a handful of larger universities. We have not seen the last of Benno Schmidt's, TC '63, LAW '66, red scissors, nor of hiring freezes. There is a touch of schadenfreude in me at this, and a great deal of sympathy. If, having been denied Damascus, you are instead heading to Mecca, that's just as well: Yale is already two steps ahead of you.

So, what did David learn at college? He learned that many people figured all that out four years ago, and that the noises of the eager freshmen of Directed Studies were all too easily tuned out by the indifference of the greater populace. He learned that computer science is a boy's best friend, and that the humanities were often founded upon judgment schemas with all the determinacy of a shell game. He learned that if he was willing to settle for good-but-not-fantastic grades, he would have time for important things like reading and writing and going to New York and Boston and watching movies and following the Fall around on tour.

I've also held my complaints mostly to the docile box of this column; others have been more vocal. For many of you, Yale is the last institution you will attend that you'll have any chance to shake your fist at, either directly or indirectly. This is because you pay them rather than vice versa; it's bad form to bite the hand that feeds you. But, because we keep coughing up the dough, there's no real possibility of any "counterculture;" the only real gesture of protest is leaving, which we all eventually do anyway. (Well, leaving or opening fire on everyone, like in that movie if..., but that was just an allegory.) To all self-styled extremists and hipsters: any culture brought here is by definition co-opted into the privileged classes, and when the revolution comes, you will not be spared. (Told you there was a joke.)

Though I don't know you, there are the quiet ones of you out there, and you know who you are, that have sought insulation in some form or another from the interference and noise of college life. I have no revelations at hand for you folks, but to those of you I know, I'm glad I do. I've had a good time of it here. For every ream of manuscript "written in lipstick passing as blood," as Stephen Dixon says, I've found a purple passage or two of sincerity, and that pretty much has to make it worthwhile. So I leave you with the words of Nikolai Gogol:

"The ridiculous will emerge spontaneously through the very seriousness with which each character is occupied with his own affairs. Only the audience, from its detached position, can perceive the vanity of their concerns. But they themselves do not joke at all and have no inkling that anybody is laughing at them."

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• 'Whiteout' a washout, 4/10/97
• The legacy of Julian Jaynes, 3/27/97
• Cassavetes' legacy--or lack thereof, 2/27/98

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