Pomeranz: Yale and the real world
Soon the senior class will proceed through Memorial Gate into city life and the quotidian logic it employs.
The Gothic architecture and cultivated courtyards we will leave behind freed us for some time from the demands, fashions and expectations of life outside our gates. The strange traditions we employed make sense only according to Yale’s logic. (The Yale tradition that tried to make money by the world’s rules, Mory’s, failed of necessity.)
By and large, Yale and Yalies recognize that the garden walls allow us to cultivate the garden: Yale frees us all from outside...
Happy? Who do you hang out with? And what level of happiness have you determined is real happiness? I see sadness, suffering, smiles covering sorrows within. Yale is powerful and all powerful things take us to the highest heights and the lowest depths if we are willing to embrace the journey.
And individualistic? I am large, I contain multitudes. And you are a part of my bigness. Your individuality is an illusion. Obama is the prophet. Heed his call.
calm down. we are happy. we are happy!
The Yale you present is a sentimental, beautified and idealistic rendering of a corporation. I'm an English major in my junior year, enrolled in one of the best departments in one of the best universities in the world, but the Yale I know and love is not the Crystal Palace that you describe. Such a social utopia would not be a very interesting place to inhabit. We develop against the university as much as we develop in tandem with it, and we owe Yale as much from growing against it, reacting to it, critiquing it, as we do idolizing it. The great thing about this place is the fact that you don't have to worship it blindly in order to thrive here, or elsewhere.