Yale Daily News

Four former columnists who graduated in May write about their lives these days, and share perspectives they have gained since leaving Yale.

BY SAM BAGG

Hasliberg-Goldern, Switzerland

Today I woke up at 9:30. It was three and a half hours later than usual, and more importantly, it was the first time I hadn’t seen the sun rise in a month.

I think the same thing happened at Yale once, except it was a different sort of sunrise that I missed by waking up at 9:30 p.m., having turned in my last paper of the semester at 5 in the morning.

Needless to say, life after Yale is … different.

A year ago today, I was meeting with my adviser about my senior essay, recovering from a statistics midterm and going to a beer tasting with David Swensen (thanks, Silliman), during which he received a panicked phone call from President Levin about the recession. (Side note: I love Google Calendar.)

Today, I have just returned from a humbling four-day hike to a glacier in the Swiss Alps, and I’m preparing to give my AP World History students their first unit test tomorrow (yes, they have school on Saturday).

My daily contact involves no one between the ages of 18 and 27; my weekends have shrunk from four days to one; and I finally understand the true meaning of “no free time,” a phrase Yalies throw around with surprising ease considering all the free time they have.

And yet, somehow, my new life fits. I work at the Ecole D’Humanité — a bleeding-edge progressive boarding school in Switzerland — as a teacher, residential adviser (read: cop/psychologist), basketball coach, dance instructor and hike leader, among other things. Each of these labels should be increasingly humorous for anyone who knows me; my first Facebook photo album (a rite of passage for anyone of our generation living abroad) received comments almost exclusively about how ridiculous it is that I am here. For me, that’s all on purpose. This year in the mountains is a premeditated challenge, a year-long stretch.

And the most surprising thing about it all, perhaps, is how easy it is. When your environment shifts drastically, you tend to be carried along in the surf. (What’s that? You want me to descend this rock face without a harness, having never hiked before? Sure!)

That’s the philosophy of this school: It’s an immersion program, not just into the German language but also into an entirely different lifestyle. In addition to strenuous hiking requirements, students can’t have cell phones or iPods or laptops, they never watch movies or television, and they clean the entire school themselves. It’s inconceivable for most of the kids when they start out, but once they’re here, it makes sense.

I’m always struck by how much my surroundings seem to affect my way of being — something you normally think of as fixed. At Yale, I was outgoing, energetically irresponsible and almost always lighthearted. Here in the mountains, I am reserved and reliable; much more an observer than a participant. In some ways, it’s good — my plasticity allows me to adapt quickly to my new home and engage fully in it; hooray for self-discipline and folk dancing and being on time!

But there’s a downside too; someone said to me after a skit I performed for the school that it was nice to see I could have a “silly” side, and I was taken aback — before, things like this defined my self-conception. I saw what she meant, though; I felt like the same person inside, but the role I was performing had changed quite a bit.

Who I was at Yale has been at least partially left behind, and to be sure, that’s part of the graduation process — almost all of my friends are experiencing something similar. But I liked that person; he was fun and he had fun. Do I have to give him up just because I am a teacher, an adult, a responsible figure who has to make up for looking younger than some of his students by being extra strict? Obviously not. But I haven’t yet figured out how to negotiate these boundaries, how to manage my various selves in harmony.

One of the hardest things about graduating has been to fully embrace my new environment, without also throwing away what I’d spent four years building at Yale. The only advice I have so far is to appreciate — and cultivate — that kernel of a person that exists no matter where you go and who you’re with. When you graduate, that is what you’ll carry with you.

Sam Bagg is a 2009 graduate of Silliman College and the author of the column “Freethinker.”

BY PETER JOHNSTON

Fifty years from now, the class of 2009 will probably stand out for the paucity of its charitable giving to Yale. But it would not be surprising were our class to produce a disproportionate number of writers. What does a Yale graduate do when unemployed? He tells everyone he is “writing a book.” At the very least, the recession has given those of us whose jobs fell through the opportunity to reconsider how we arrived at where we are — to reconsider our educational system, our economy, our democracy.

The resulting analysis is surprising. It reveals that Yale is failing to challenge the prejudices of its students. Sure, Yale students are not racist. For the most part, they are not sexist. Outside a coterie of reactionary co-religionists who are unlikely to be persuaded by rational discourse, they are not homophobes. Will anyone admit to being Republican?

But Yale students are as prejudiced as ever. Their central prejudice is an unflinching faith in the justice of meritocracy. Perhaps this faith is understandable. If social standing is not to be premised on inherited qualities such as race or sex, one alternative is to premise it upon the strength of will required to climb the meritocratic ladder. The conceit of the system is that it redeems the injustice of social class by founding it upon free will. In theology, free will absolved God of injustice for sending people to hell. Now free will absolves meritocracy of injustice for sending some students to community college.

Emboldened by the rectitude of their standing (and salaries), meritocrats move into affluent city neighborhoods and old suburbs. There they may work with their minds, reside among beautiful houses, eat local food, attend performances of high culture, volunteer in very poor communities, vote for Democrats. Life resembles nothing more than a grown-up version of college. But those who attend community college, or no college at all, live a life analogous to their educational background. They work to provide a service, reside in a landscape of utilitarian sprawl, shop at Walmart, watch TV, attend megachurches.

The result is a nationwide segregation the likes of which this country has never seen. The American frontier favored tenacity, courage and hard work, but affluence and squalor rose up side by side. Meritocracy favors memorization, analytical detachment and individuality, and the losers are sorted out to stay home while the winners prepare to go away.

It’s hard to say who gets the better bargain. The meritocrats enjoy beautiful communities, the high culture of Western civilization and the sparkling conversation of their educated confreres. But they rarely return home, have friendships that only last as long as one’s job and need to make a lot of money (or take on few dependents) to maintain their quality of life. The working classes subsist on lesser means by shopping at highly artificial and efficient stores, consume mass culture rather than expressing individuality, and live in a sea of asphalt and automobiles. But they often have large families and lifelong friendships and they come to know the deep rhythms of a place.

The one sure result of meritocracy is the erosion of democracy. Meritocracy is perfectly liberal: It is founded on freedom and unleashes the autonomy of its winners. And meritocracy thinks it is democratic because it believes in the equal freedom of all men. But democracy requires a substantive similarity among men, and not merely an abstract egalitarianism. If our identity is defined by nothing more than our own will to climb the meritocratic latter, then we will not trust a collective lawmaking process. It is this failure of legitimacy, born of meritocracy, that has put and will keep our democracy in deadlock for years to come.

Peter Johnston is a 2009 graduate of Saybrook College and the author of the column “Tilting at Windmills.”

BY EAMON MURPHY

Cambridge, England

My life after Yale has been both dream-come-true and harrowing nightmare. First the dream: After someone else turned it down, I received Yale’s Paul Mellon Fellowship for graduate study at Cambridge, where I am now. This place is visually overwhelming; it makes Yale look like the Magic Kingdom. Then, the nightmare: Over the summer I lost it completely and wound up in a mental hospital.

How did this happen?

In a state of post-college/pre-graduate school limbo, I had too much time on my hands to worry obsessively, as is my wont. Eventually things got so bad that I started taking a benzodiazepine for my anxiety, which backfired completely. I had some kind of awful paradoxical reaction and found myself in the middle of a major depressive episode: I cycled, seemingly out of control, through periods of severe confusion, inexplicable tachycardia and extreme apathy. Many times I thought I was going to die. By the end, it felt as though my brain were being suffocated. That’s when I checked myself in.

In the mental hospital you take medication and talk a lot to medical students and residents. I had several roommates, including an owl-faced Dutch alcoholic, a wife-beater, and a New York City fireman who has been near-catatonic since Sept. 11, 2001. One patient, named Serena, complained of acute, unremitting derealization, which was an intermittent symptom of my own condition, and perhaps the most distressing one.

I’ve read various attempts at verbalizing this phenomenon — “like being in a dream,” “a fog” — but the truth is it can’t be described. The best I can say is that it’s like the perceptual components of being drunk, with a vaguely sinister aura in place of the good feelings. There were moments when I feared ending up like Serena — “It’s torture,” she’d repeat throughout the day. “I’m being tortured” — but I couldn’t help suspecting that her self-pity was part of the problem. Anyone in Serena’s position deserves near-infinite sympathy, but eventually I realized that there was some psychic mechanism, however buried, which controlled the derealization. Armed with this understanding, and a bunch of pills, I’ve made what seems to be a full recovery.

And I’ve learned that you can make friends anywhere — or, to formulate the point more strongly, that friends are worth making everywhere. Humanity is wonderful when we are our best selves, and there are times when the gift of a graham-cracker packet can help you endure purgatorial pain. I just got an e-mail this morning from the best friend I made there, a guy who arrived at the same time I did after going King Kong in the middle of Fifth Avenue. “Am going tomorrow am to booze place for 28 days,” he told me. “Will send more detailed email soon. Work hard, Robert.”

No one who wrote me a recommendation should worry: I’m here and I’m ready to work. Starting next week I’ll be pursuing an M.Phil. in Medieval and Renaissance literature. Though it’s not yet certain what I’ll take up in my dissertation, right now I’m interested in reading Renaissance poetry in light of contemporary theories of the imagination — not in the sense of creative invention, but rather as the word was originally used, meaning the power to form internal images or ideas of objects and situations not present to the senses. I’m considering Othello, as well as the short poems of a fellow with the wonderful name Fulke Greville. Check out his sonnet “In night, when colors all to black are cast,” a disturbing account of inner vision in the midst of darkness.

Which brings us back to going crazy. I don’t recommend it; it’s hugely expensive. But if it happens, you can get better. I honestly thought I was done for, and that didn’t help; but now I’ve got my brain, and I’m grateful.

Know yourselves. I’ll close with what we mental patients say to someone who’s leaving the unit: “Good luck.” Believe me, it has more meaning in context.

Eamon Murphy is a 2009 graduate of Saybrook College and the author of the column “Super-Seniority.”

BY MICHAEL ZINK

For three semesters I wrote a satirical opinion column for the News, and to say that this has been the crowning accomplishment of my life so far would be an understatement.

Not only did it bring me a not-not-inconsiderable degree of prestige within the Yale community and among the few non-Yale weirdos who read the News, but it also afforded me the opportunity to have one of my columns republished in a prestigious national publication. The article was entitled “Secret societies drink blood, worship crab gods,” and the publication was Hustler Magazine.

“If I can’t be Kurt Vonnegut,” I thought, perusing my piece, which was printed opposite a photo spread purporting to depict a Real College Girl, “then I can at least be Kilgore Trout.” You can too, someday, if you write for the opinion page of the Yale Daily News. Just don’t write satire unless you enjoy self-abuse.

I’ve seen several satires on these pages since my departure, and I can’t help but wonder whether the authors were satisfied by the responses they received. Probably not. Writing a satirical piece is, after all, an act of foolish optimism. Its goal is to create laughs and win minds by appealing to reason, humanity and a shared sense of the absurd.

To do so requires a few assumptions about people: first, that they have reason, humanity and a shared sense of the absurd. Also that people will read your piece closely enough to notice the clues that you’ve carefully laid out for them. Tall orders, indeed.

Should it be any surprise that those assumptions so frequently prove false?

After last November’s election, I wrote a column mocking the absurd, self-contradictory insinuations about Barack Obama’s religion, heritage and political leanings during the presidential race. I did this by accusing the then-president-elect of being an “Islamo-socialist” and implying that his children were “pint-sized terrorist operatives.” It was a straightforward gag, or so I thought.

To my surprise, the morning the column ran I received a breathless e-mail thanking me for “coming forward with the facts that so many blindly chose to ignore.” This was no random lunatic, either; it was someone who worked for the Yale medical school. I wish I could say that she was kidding.

If you’re a liberal, and you’re feeling smug at this display of conservative blockheadedness, you shouldn’t. One Obama supporter commented on the News’ website that to “accuse the president-elect of the United States of being a terrorist or an Islamo-socialist and criticize all of us who have worked so hard to make this dream become a reality is a crime that goes beyond denunciation.”

Emphasis is needed here. To this anonymous commenter, my sarcastic denunciation of Obama was not simply a crime like shoplifting, indecent exposure, or assault. It was a “crime that goes beyond denunciation,” like genocide.

My friends and I used to enjoy finding the most amusing and outlandish misrepresentations of my opinion columns. When I mocked Ron Paul’s stance on the gold standard, my column was posted with a glowing review on a Ron Paul campaign Web site. My parody of the feminist outcry about Palin was attacked as a smear against Palin. And so on.

This is not merely because I am an incompetent satirist (though a number of online commenters have told me that I am). After all, fake stories from the inimitable parody newspaper The Onion are routinely reprinted by clueless news outlets as fact. Even Jonathan Swift was so frequently misread that he lamented, “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason so few are offended by it.” Why, then, do we even try? It’s because we’re optimists. Foolish ones.

Speaking of misguided optimism, I have decided to spend the next few months writing a musical. I have a degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry and a hearing loss. And although countless well-intentioned people have attempted to draw the comparison, I am not “like Beethoven.”

Dare to dream, kids.

Michael Zink is a 2009 graduate of Saybrook College andthe author of the column “Badges to Beggars.”