The class of ’78 wore white armbands against their black graduation robes to protest apartheid in South Africa. Tuesday, the Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel (SCAI) implored Stanford to divest from companies profiting from Israeli military occupation of Palestinian land. I didn’t see any armbands, and it wasn’t the SCAI’s fault. It’s that when you walk up to most Stanford students and try to interest them in divestment, more often than not they could care less.
Stanford University: a school dedicated to the blowing winds of freedom, strewn with anguished Rodin sculptures and smiling tourists; my question: when did the tourists replace the hippies? You can do anything here, create the next six-figure iPhone app, make a start-up your sophomore year, everything except go to class, toss a ball and linger at dinner with your classmates. Forget the Farm, this place is the Lab. Students are fed opportunity with 10 silver spoons, and the options overwhelm them. Instead of sitting with the feeling of not knowing what it is they want to do with their lives, students take off in all 10 directions at once. Some don’t have time for class. Most don’t have time to run around and toss a ball, and none have time to stay at dinner any longer than it takes them to shovel down their food.
My father’s Stanford was about sitting on the grass and shooting the breeze. Playing Ultimate barefoot on Roble Field. My Stanford shoots emails, texts, anything to increase efficiency and decrease face-time. My Stanford needs Frisbee cleats. Where are the artists? The hippies? The movers and shakers?
The irony is, my father’s movers and shakers were the same privileged kids as the students I’m charging with complacency. And maybe they weren’t all that different from the assholes down the hall in my freshman dorm. Maybe my dad was the asshole down the hall.
But for all their privilege and cluelessness and self-interest, they didn’t have the option to indulge short attention spans with Facebook profiles or iPhone screens. They too were fed by silver spoons, just not as many. If there is any instance where less is more, I argue it is the number of silver spoons jabbing at a student’s mouth to grab her attention.
I know — my diamond shoes are too tight; I have access to all those spoons, and instead of taking advantage of Stanford, I complain, “No one here wants to sit in the sun and pretend to know about politics with me!” I assure you I would not write this if I didn’t believe something vital to the health of my student body were at stake. When students are spread so thin between being Olympians and entrepreneurs, many miss the whole point of attending college. They get jaded, or close-minded or lonely. I miss the point a good deal of the time; I’m too busy to care about divestment, or the Dalai Lama’s visit to campus or the girl upstairs who needs someone to talk to.
It feels like a terrible waste of privilege to be at Stanford and feel jaded. I want to care passionately about divestment, and I don’t think that joining one more politically correct club is the solution. Call me a romantic, but I have a hunch the solution starts with sitting on the grass and shooting the breeze. After all, how am I going to care passionately about people harmed by Israeli settlements if I’m too busy to care about the people around me? This is an invitation to my generation to take the time with me to learn how to care about people again. Take a break from your honors theses, your coding, your weightlifting, and look me in the eye and talk to me. Let’s strum the same three chords on guitar for an hour and sing our hearts out. Let’s get sidetracked together, and let the long-term goals go for a moment. We’re still young — let’s act like it. We can’t go back to 1978, but maybe we can slow down 2011 until we get our priorities straight.
Renee Donovan, ‘14