Staff Box by Geoff Mulvihill

The lesson that I learned in college

During my first night in Oberlin (Aug. 27, 1993), I talked with a girl (a few weeks later, I'd characterize her as a woman) who didn't eat meat. As a smart and skeptical as I was, I made fun of her and her silly practice. "What's the matter, you don't want to eat the poor little animals?" Well, I must have said something funnier than that because it was a riot at the time - or I thought so. Not eating meat seemed to me a funny, funny thing. And back then I was sharp enough to know that it was weird. She had some succinct answer, a justification for not consuming flesh and she laughed at me much as I laughed at her. I don't think after that first hot August night she and I have had a single conversation.

Two weeks ago I was home in Iowa for Thanksgiving and my aunt asked me why I didn't eat meat. Unlike the woman I'd met over three years earlier, I didn't have a succinct answer. That's because I no longer think there are succinct answers to questions. There are reasons for my deciding not eating meat any more- a decision I made a few months after that conversation my first night at Oberlin, but I can't articulate them at all. There's a complexity to those arguments that I don't fully understand. All I know sometimes is how little I know. It's true I can be passionate about some things, such as free speech, I'm a passive vegetarian. I didn't try to explain that to my aunt either.

As I finish college, I'm not sure I've learned much actual stuff since I arrived wide-eyed and yet nearly omniscient. Maybe it's that eighth semester during which Oberlin students learn everything, or maybe I snoozed through class the day we learned everything. But I won't know, since I'm graduating after seven semesters. The difference in me, after the parent-shocking hair lengths and political theory classes I've gone through is that I don't have answers now. In high school, when there was good and bad, values were easy to define. Like this: There's a huge national debt, so balancing the budget must be good. Now, balancing the budget has a moral component and an economic one. Now, requiring a balanced budget would mean the government wouldn't have an important role in trying to fix the often-broken economic state of the country through fiscal policy. And there'd be implications for growth (which has its own set of social issues) and the stock market (which has its own issues too) and employment and the way candidates campaign for the presidency and a billion other things. After nine college economics courses, I've pondered just a few of those billion things.

There are always a billion ideas to ponder on a billion issue. Before I came here, I believed this place to be a Utopia. I thought I'd come here and spend four years learning the handful of answers I didn't have already and I'd read all those Classics I meant to have read before then. People would be passionate and well-informed and they'd throw all sorts of protests on behalf of their rational, well-developed convictions. Best of all, I'd be here in a small tree-lined town in Ohio, happily isolated (with 2,800 other truth-seeking students, most of them roughly my age) from the rest of the world and all its problems and all the little things (broken toasters, when double coupon day is, mutual funds) people worry about on the outside. And maybe in that atmosphere, I'd find some sort of Enlightenment.

I suppose my vision of College wasn't realized (I didn't read many Classics, I found people weren't always well-informed and that they were often apathetic and that many of the students, including me, spent their hours doing things other that seeking some Truth), so maybe I should be unsatisfied. Maybe that's why that I'm bailing out a semester ahead of schedule so I can go somewhere else that's not a school. But I don't expect anywhere else to be a better place than this one. Oberlin is a bit Utopian, but Utopia, it seems, isn't all I thought it might be. I found soon after I got here (even before I stopped eating meat) that my passion is for anything but sitting in a room reading Dante and Foulcault (both of whose works are gathering dust on my shelves), but rather for being a part of the flow of a world where people have very different vocations. It's the rest of the world and its mutual funds and broken toasters that seem most captivating. When I get there (in a few weeks) it's not going to be easy. I can't always explain the things that I am, like a vegetarian. It's all so complex.