The products of our places

Following Steve Jobs’ death, the Weekly Standard’s Adam J. White wrote a blog post titled, “Steve Jobs, and the Valley that Created Him.” In it, White argued that Jobs and the company he built were inextricably linked to Silicon Valley, the community where he grew up. The Valley’s computer clubs gave a young Jobs the opportunity to butt heads with like-minded hobbyists interested in nascent technology. “Apple emerged from these origins,” White wrote, “but it never left them. Apple relied upon the Valley’s tech community — the people, the money, the intellectual capital — as it grew. Its engineers and designers interacted, as in any small town, with those of its competitors … It’s symbolic of the nation’s greatest advances (for better or worse), which tend to grow out of communities, from Wall Street’s finance to Detroit’s automobiles to Hollywood’s cinema to Washington’s big government.”

Community is no less important in the lives of the students who make up each freshman class at Princeton. All of us matriculate as products of our places. We come to this university with a set of morals instilled by our friends, family and neighbors. Our experiences at home shape our intellectual interests, define our work habits and provide us with the motivation to make the most of our time on this campus.

But Princeton is its own community (albeit a very fragmented one), and it exerts a magnetic force on us; it pulls us closer the longer we are here, until we’re graduating seniors singing the alma mater under Blair Arch before Class Day.

By that point, just as surely as we were once primarily products of our hometowns, we’ve also become products of this place. Freshmen who matriculate — having been encouraged for years by parents to strive for medical school — may end up graduating as architecture majors. Students who come to Princeton with plans to work in government might leave intending to pursue philosophy Ph.Ds. And this place doesn’t just shift our intellectual trajectory; it shapes the social and professional networks that carry us through the rest of our lives.

But one of the unfortunate consequences of the existence of communities like this university is that they are, to some degree, parasitic. White noted this phenomenon in the case of Silicon Valley, writing, “We rely on community to foster greatness, such as in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. But the success of those communities undermines the cohesiveness of so many others, as young people from across the country leave their own families and hometowns behind to pursue success in high tech or finance.”

This also is true of Princeton and other great universities. Unlike the Valley, of course, college is only a temporary home for students. But four years of exposure to the opportunities offered at a place like Princeton can make it so much harder to return home permanently.

This can be a result of one’s course of studies alone. For many students from small towns, there may simply be no good way to put the skills learned in pursuit of degrees in engineering or economics to local use.

But there are also other temptations not to return home — the academic prestige of fellowships for graduate studies, the intellectual satisfaction of work in think tanks, the allure of life in the countries where we study abroad and whose languages we’re taught to speak and, for some, the high compensation of careers on Wall Street.

The process of detachment from our homes may start long before we graduate. On Election Day, we’re forced to choose loyalties: Register at home and vote absentee? Or vote in Princeton for local candidates? But the decision between loyalty to campus or to hometown is not always conscious. We’ve all made the classic slip-up before — referring to a trip back to campus after break as “going home” — and when our parents hear it, it stings for a reason. There’s usually at least a grain of truth to it.

To be sure, our experiences at Princeton can strengthen some of the values we learn at home. This is particularly true for students who make use of the religious opportunities the University provides to connect more deeply with their families’ faiths. But depending on one’s intellectual influences here, one might just as easily be drawn toward a secularism at odds with one’s family traditions. Four years is a long enough time to erode some of our most deeply held personal philosophies.

In each individual case, the choice to divorce oneself from local loyalties isn’t necessarily bad; one might be right in some circumstances to discard ties to certain local beliefs or institutions after reflection from a distance.

But we can’t pretend there’s no harm done by our attachment to this university. Most of us stand on the shoulders of local institutions that have made us who we are. We ought to be conscious of the fact that as a whole, our academic and professional success undermines those institutions when it pulls us away from them.