In that moment, I realized how far removed I had become from the real world after two years at Yale. This man, a real human who stood before me in the flesh, with whom I was standing in solidarity, would normally have been a sound bite on a television report to me. I might have read about him in short quotes from the Chicago Tribune.
My parents had sent me off to college with exhortations to seize every opportunity, and I felt immersed in my life here—so much so that I had no conception of any other life. Being at Yale was supposed to make me more aware, perhaps more worldly. Instead, college had made me knowledgeable about and focused on Yale, and very isolated from anything outside it.
All through my freshman year, I was blind to the fact that I felt so removed from the world. During breakfast, I would scroll drowsily through the New York Times to make myself feel informed. In reality, the articles felt only slightly more real to me than a novel.
After my routine check of the headlines, I would shut my laptop, go to class, and completely forget everything I read until the next day, when I repeated this process. This was my sole method of connecting to the world outside Yale. In my daily life, I felt no need to ponder distant crises or think about geopolitical implications. I could reference them to score intellectual awareness points, but I didn’t think deeply about the problems that lay beyond Yale’s walls.
Even on a municipal scale, Yale is insular. We talk about our campus-centric lives by referencing the “Yale Bubble,” but we do not often consider how many of the stores we shop at and the restaurants we frequent are owned by Yale. We are so focused on our nine square blocks that we think that the world outside has no bearing here.
In one way, the ability to limit our exposure to the world makes college enjoyable. We have the unique ability to determine what issues we want to impact us and to filter out issues which are too depressing or too big for us to want to consider. The world is reduced to a series of articles, and we can peruse them at our leisure.
Still, though, there are ways that we can ground ourselves in the world beyond campus. Exciting courses can be found in the Bluebook about the economics of poverty and policing in America. There are student organizations that work directly with the New Haven community or challenge Yalies to be conscious of the environment in our daily lives. These opportunities directly subvert the tendency of Yalies to isolate themselves.
The reality of life as a college student is that activities directly tied to Yale take precedence over all else. In theory, the availability of school-sponsored activities that connect us to the larger world should make being engaged global citizens much easier. But if we are not careful, our original aspirations can be compressed into trivial tasks: just another calendar filler or résumé builder, just something else to check off the list.
We need to start by changing the way our organizations recruit new members. Under the status quo, freshmen shuffle into Payne Whitney Gym and are coaxed or bribed into signing up for panlists. Instead of encouraging each other to join clubs that either align with our interests or take us into new intellectual territory, we have created a system that values frenzy over focus and volume over voice. The number of groups you join becomes more important than their content, which creates a sense that fitting in and staying relevant on campus necessitates cramming schedules to capacity.
In this paradigm, we are mixing (and mixing up) social capital with world awareness. College is an ideal space in which to become a more conscious citizen and to encourage others to do so as well. But we shouldn’t allow ourselves to become a herd that flocks to whichever cause is most popular.
Physically, we are all together in one space; mentally, we are open to new ideas and ways of looking at the world. We should take full advantage of this opportunity to help each other become better world citizens, which need not require leaving behind interests we find valuable for ourselves. Moreover, we should be ready to discuss things that we think are important and push each other to consider more, hear more, and learn more—not just to do more and go along with the overscheduled mob mentality.
College is more than just an end in itself. It is a stepping stone, an opportunity to prepare for a world of real tumult and real problems. Learning to be an informed student prepares us to become informed adults who can live lives of significance. While we may feel removed now, in a few years we will no longer have that excuse. We will be doctors and teachers and (most likely) investment bankers, and we will no longer be able to comfort ourselves by saying that our individual action—or inaction—does not matter. Now, we need to stop reading the news as a novel and start looking at it as our story, one which we will ultimately have the responsibility of writing.