There's more to life than 'The City'

Back in my day
    By Chris Clemens

Beginning on that magical day when each of us receives his or her acceptance letter from this academic Eden we call Yale, we all start to ponder the same question. Why did I get in? Why, among the thousands of hyper-competitive, steroid-enhanced SAT studs in the applicant pool, did the admissions committee choose me? Obviously, there is no one answer—each of us has a range of talents and viewpoints to offer the Yale community. After years of careful reflection, however, I have become convinced that one of the reasons I, as a child of the Past-the-Great-Plains-but-Not-Quite-California West, was given a shot at this intellectual Top Gun was to spread a simple but defiant message: the world does not revolve around New York City.

It's not our fault that our perspectives at Yale become so quickly skewed toward "The City," as many students come to call it. Once you get on your feet as a freshman and start looking ahead toward career plans, you quickly realize that although the major companies have offices all over the world, their best training programs are inevitably in New York.

The Big Apple holds an obvious claim to cultural dominance as well. On weekends, New York's entertainment options are only one-and-a-half hours and $23 in train fare away. There's always a New York native eager to introduce you to his or her old haunts and homies. With its boundless opportunities and interesting people, "The City" is Yale writ large.

New York's hegemonic influence on career and culture, however, takes a gradual and subtle toll. Those of us unfortunate enough to have any interest in sports are slowly brainwashed into becoming Knicks or Yankees fans. Other Yalies from glamour-impaired parts of the country allow their college years to be slowly warped into a sort of finishing school for participation in New York City "society." Reading the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times becomes a compulsive habit. They feel naked if they haven't memorized the season schedule for the Metropolitan Opera. A craving for bagels sets in, and though the impulse toward denial is strong, they quickly become hooked. By graduation a professional life in Manhattan seems the only logical vehicle by which hapless students can fulfill their goals.

With some courage and foresight, though, it is possible to extricate oneself from the Yale-New York trap. The great thing about a Yale degree is that it gives you a reasonable hope of success in life no matter where you go, no matter what kind of radical path you choose to pursue. Rich, a friend of mine, decided after graduation to move to Wyoming and become a ranch hand. While his friends were suiting up for interviews at Undergraduate Career Services, he was in the courtyard lassoing fenceposts. This display made me wonder what had possessed him, an alumnus of Yale and an elite Washington, D.C., prep school, to gamble with his future on what seemed like a crazy whim. He responded that he wanted to do something "real," something where the challenges he faced would be totally unlike anything he had seen before in school or would ever see again.

After a few more years of my own education, I began to understand what Rich meant. As cloistered as we sometimes feel at Yale, it's possible to feel every bit as isolated from reality in New York, where the Ivy League lifestyle continues unabated. Rich knew that the New York City academic-financial complex was after him, and he decided to give it a big fat middle finger in the face.

Obviously, Rich's case was an extreme one, but his escape to Wyoming raises a valid point. Yale's emphasis on diversity is not simply a tool the admissions office uses to maintain de facto geographical quotas, nor does it lose its value once we leave the confines of the university. We didn't come to Yale a heterogeneous group of whiz kids only to graduate a homogenized mass of Wall Street zombies. In our pursuit of personal betterment and high culture, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that real cosmopolitanism involves stepping outside familiar boundaries to try new things, even if those boundaries are as expansive as those of New York City. Don't believe the hype: New York is not the center of the universe.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• Give something back, 1/29/99
• The view from Orange Street, 1/15/99

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