Sorting out our priorities

It happens to most of us as Dean’s Date approaches. As we start cramming in all the information we were supposed to have processed throughout the semester, we’re forced to come to terms with what we haven’t learned. For all that our courses offer us — the subject variety, the often (but not always) fantastic lectures, the well-selected reading lists — sometimes we retain only enough definitions, explanations and arguments to make the grade. All that skimming (and skipping) of readings takes a toll.

According to Nathan Mathabane, the problem is one of volume. We’re “overwhelmed by a cascade of sometimes dense reading and radically difficult problem sets. The raw amount of mental effort required to parse the vast stores of information contained in much of our assigned work makes it almost impossible to engage with it all at a meaningful level.”

As someone who struggled (unsuccessfully, if you must know) to manage a courseload that gave me 800-1000 pages of reading a week lastspring, I sympathize. Some courses really do inundate us withtoo much work to make sense of it all. But not every course is so full offat worth cutting. More importantly, by asking only if we’re beingfed too much information by our professors, we ignore the other sideof this problem.

What we learn in a class isn’t just a function of how many problem sets and how much reading the professor assigns. It’s also a function of our devotion to that class relative to other commitments. And at Princeton, we tend to be too busy to give each class the attention it deserves. This isn’t an original thought. I’ve heard it plenty of times from professors like Evan Thomas who see students “doing less than their best work because they are spread too thin.”But it'sworth considering before we start asking professors to change their curricula for the sake of our ability to learn.

Often academic overburdening is our own fault, not our professors’.Focusing too much on avoiding Thursday classes may distract us fromthe fact that multiple classes in our chosen schedule assign hundreds of pagesof reading a week.Moreover, sheer academic ambition coupled with an inability to choose between equally fascinating courses can make us forget our limits and take on unnecessary extra courses. And when our courseloads prove to be too heavy, sometimes we’re too stubborn to drop one difficult class so we can focus more on the others.

But usually — as has been noted before in this page — our overextension is primarily extracurricular in nature. We push off papers until our deadlines because we’re busy advocating for education reform. We come to precept not having done our readings because we spend all night preparing for Model U.N. conferences. When few in number, these distractions can be manageable. But we don’t do things in moderation at Princeton. Sometimes we take on so many extracurricular commitments that the work we do outside of class occupies more of our time than the work we do for class. With lighter courseloads, our commitments might simply expand to fill the extra time.

By surrounding us with other type-A personalities whose color-coded iCals are always full, Princeton encourages this. When we don’t dip our toes into everything at once, we feel like we’re missing out.Ashard as these varied commitments make it for us to devoteourselves to specific passions and academic pursuits,we press on; closing doors is against the Princeton ethos. (I’m not trying to preach here. I’m as guilty as anyone else.)

I don't question that we'd be better off if some professors with especially thick syllabi took Mathabane’s advice to “reduceand distill the knowledge which they attempt to impart on theirstudents.” But professors shouldn’t be expected to compromise their visions for their courses to accommodate acampus culture that stretches us all too thin and makes it harder forus to find the time for our books.

Professors can’t set our priorities for us. Perhaps the variety thatcharacterizes today’s Princeton experience is worth its price inlost depth of learning. But if we really do want to learn morewhile we’re here, maybe the change should start on our end.

Jacob Reses is a Wilson School major from Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.