After three years of cultivating friendships with younger students and devoting hours of hard work to student organizations, seniors seem to get cut off. Though seniors can still involve themselves in campus life, we are less visible as we spend more time in our carrels, reading, writing and fretting.
As I sat in my carrel for the past three weeks, the reading, writing, and fretting was joined by some thinking. It was a thinking that is difficult to experience when the obligations of a dance group, publication or student government are tugging at you. I’ve heard the process of writing a thesis described as being in a masochistic relationship, training for a marathon, even giving birth. But in addition to the pain and frustration, there is also a lot of discovery. Writing a thesis entails coming up with new ideas by arguing with oneself and writing down sentences even when they are less than perfect. It is also a lonely experience, requiring many solitary hours of staring blankly at the computer.
Above all, thesis writing is an intellectual experience. It’s an experience that goes beyond the academic work that Princeton students are trained to do in their first three years. As historian Richard Hofstadter put it, intellectual as in “intellectualism” is “the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind,” as opposed to “intelligence,” which merely seeks to “grasp, manipulate, reorder, [and] adjust.” For many, the thesis may turn out to be their most intellectual experience at Princeton.
The issue of a dearth of intellectualism at Princeton is periodically raised. The most serious discussion recently took place in 2003 when the U-Council drafted an open letter to the Princeton community calling attention to the dearth of intellectualism. A subsequent investigation by The Daily Princetonian suggested that many students indeed felt that there simply isn’t “a general excitement about academics” relative to other schools. While the investigation pointed to “debaucherous weekends” as a culprit, perhaps time spent on intellectual pursuits is inversely related to time spent on other pursuits and commitments.
In 1929, Virginia Woolf put forth the idea that “a woman needs a room of her own” in order to write fiction. Similarly, Princeton students may need rooms of their own to write, think and tap into their intellectual sides.
However, solitude is hard to obtain at Princeton before senior year. From the moment a student steps on campus, he is bombarded with opportunities to interact with a small group of people in an a cappella group, to interact with a larger group of peers in an eating club or to interact with a community outside the gates through a volunteer tutoring program. It isn’t until senior year that Princeton students who’ve made commitments allow themselves to stop interacting to work on that 100-page behemoth.
In addition to these institutionalized obligations, there are also purely social interactions. It’s not that Princeton students are more into partying or procrastinating with their friends than other college students. It’s that Princeton’s size, location and housing systems facilitate the formation of friendships. Because we live in dorms with our best friends in a town where the only places to hang out are Frist and eating clubs (and possibly Firestone) people are bound to run into each other. Though we have many clubs — Paideia and Sustained Dialogue come to mind — that promote the intellectual discussion of ideas, these typically only allow us to discuss a topic briefly and do not provide enough time to deeply ponder the issues. Ultimately, these groups are obligations as well.
This isn’t to say that extracurricular activities and friendship should be banned from this campus. Precisely the opposite: Princeton’s sense of community is unique for an institution of its size and stature. Many people come to Princeton for the experience of being at a school where people know your name. But we also need to recognize that there may be a fundamental incompatibility between a sense of community and an intellectual atmosphere. Requiring a senior thesis may be the best the University can do to give students a chance to taste solitude and tap into their intellectual side before they graduate. Maybe that is worth the agony.
Cindy Hong is a Wilson School major from Princeton, N.J. She can be reached at cindyh@princeton.edu.
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