But I had forgotten what day he’d be returning, so I asked him again. He hesitated for a second, and then told me he would be leaving for a lot longer than a week. In fact, he won’t be coming back until next fall, at best. His father has become seriously ill, and, with no one else to take care of his mother, my friend had to return home to look after both of them. And so he left the very next day. He didn’t take final exams, he didn’t go to Munich, he’s not here this spring. He’ll return next year, and he’ll repeat the junior fall he just completed: 5 courses (most with lab components), a third foreign language, junior independent work — all of which would have returned either A’s or A-minuses. One week away from the perfect semester, he dropped everything and flew home.
I don’t know how to make sense of this. Four different forms of rage are screaming through me: at him, for telling me so late; at his family, for having no one else there; at the administration, for leaving him no choice but to leave; at God, for all of the above.
We can’t do anything about most of this. There are people much worse off than my friend or even his father, and, indeed, I have neither right nor justification for such anger – I suppose it’s there to stave off something more dull and cavernous. But really, one week before the semester wraps up, we can’t let him finish it off, come back next fall one semester deficient, and wrap up halfway through the following year?
Princeton’s graduation policy mandates its undergraduates finish their programs with a graduating class – any graduating class. The only way my friend can finish this semester is by agreeing to take off not only the coming spring but also next fall, an option he cannot afford, for a number of both personal and academic reasons. If he can’t take off next fall, he won’t be allowed to finish off this one – to do so would result in his graduation halfway into 2011, something Princeton does not allow.
This policy has been in place for a while now — it is absolute. But for the life of me I can’t understand how its benefits outweigh its detriments. Students need to take off semesters all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Some need to re-think their career paths, some need to take care of more important things and some just need a little bit of distance. But why extend it? Isn’t it painful enough to be out of touch with your friends, your teachers and your studies for one semester? Why make it two? Why not, at least, shelve the absolute ban and decide on a case-by-case basis? Perhaps there are good answers (honors designations, thesis complications, and so on), but I doubt they’re either uniform or outweigh the harm in an absolute restriction.
And so I sat in my friend’s room, watching him pack his lamp, his posters, his TV – not exactly the things he would be needing in Germany. He was talking to me as if he would be back next month, as if he were still only going to Munich for a week. “Why are you sad?” he asked me. He couldn’t think about what he was leaving behind, the hours he had logged, the effort he had put in, the parties he had skipped for the sake of his work.
He couldn’t afford to: There are only so many things we can handle at a time, and when your real life comes into play, your life at Princeton takes a back seat. But he could only barely keep the pain out of his own voice. He’s doing something noble, something more basic yet more important than anything most of us do here at Princeton. We should at least let him come and go on his own terms.
Ahson Azmat is a philosophy major from Princeton, N.J. He can be reached at aazmat@princeton.edu.
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