Spotlight: Summer 2001

Profile of the future (workaholic?) elite?

“A few months ago I went to Princeton University to see what the young people who are going to be running our country in a few decades are like. . . . I asked several students to describe their daily schedules, and their replies sounded like a session of Future Workaholics of America: crew practice at dawn, classes in the morning, resident-adviser duty, lunch, study groups, classes in the afternoon, tutoring disadvantaged kids in Trenton, a cappella practice, dinner, study, science lab, prayer session, hit the StairMaster, study a few hours more. One young man told me that he had to schedule appointment times for chatting with his friends. I mentioned this in other groups, and usually one or two would volunteer that they did the same thing. ‘I just had an appointment with my best friend at seven this morning,’ one woman said. ‘Or else you lose touch.’ . . .

“The students were lively conversationalists on just about any topic—except moral argument and character building. But when I asked a group of them if they ever felt like workaholics, their faces lit up and they all started talking at once. One, a student government officer, said, ‘Sometimes we feel like we’re just tools for processing information. That’s what we call ourselves—power tools. And we call these our tool bags.’ He held up his satchel. The other students laughed, and one exclaimed, ‘You’re giving away all our secrets.’

“But nowhere did I find any real unhappiness with this state of affairs. ‘I want to be this busy,’ one young woman insisted, after describing a schedule that would count as slave-driving if it were imposed on anyone.

“The best overall description of the students’ ethos came from Professor Jeffrey Herbst. ‘They are professional students,’ he said. ‘I don’t say that pejoratively. Their profession for these four years is to be a student.’”—David Brooks, in The Atlantic Monthly, April 2001.

The Narrative tattoo?

Judith Sarnecki, a French professor at Lawrence University in Wisconsin has opened up for herself a new field of scholarship: the tattoo. “She is studying tattoos in terms of narrative-how they figure into films and novels, for example, as well as how they themselves can become symbols for a story. ‘If you ask a person about a tattoo, it’s a story they can unpack,’ she says. She is also interested in exploring the connections between physical and emotional trauma. She posits the idea that the pain of receiving a tattoo allows some people to, in a sense, replay their emotional trauma in a manageable, controlled way. By doing so, they come to terms with it.... One thing she’s sure of is that it’s ‘almost impossible to generalize about the tattoo community. People are doing it for so many reasons.’ She got a tattoo herself last summer.”—Zoë Ingalls, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 12, 2001.

Inspirational headache

Michael D. Ferrari, a professor of neurology at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, noticed similarities between Picasso’s painting styles and drawings his patients made when experiencing a “migraine aura,” a phenomenon connected with the headaches. “Prior to the onset of an intense headache episode,” writes Colin Woodard in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “about one-third of migraine sufferers experience these auras, which can make their skin tingle, disturb their speech, or cause profound visual distortions, including flashing lights, stars, or a vertical splitting of the field of vision. Some of his patients had painted their auras and showed them to him.

“Several patients had depicted faces cleaved vertically, with one side higher than the other. After studying Picasso’s work chronologically, ‘At once I saw that he started painting faces the same way,’ he said.

“The migraine hypothesis is the latest in a long list of controversial medical theories seeking to explain the work of artistic geniuses.”—Colin Woodard, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 23, 2001.

Forget the Jetsons

“The future used to seem a lot further off than it does now. Disney’s Tomorrowland and all those Ike-era pipe dreams about jet packs and Venusian colonies and space hibernation were all preposterous notions but metaphorically rich with American optimism. Today’s future is pretty much limited to our own immediate desires, polled and measured in the short term so that the latest versions of [this space available for unique product placement] can be sold right back to us. Things declared to be ‘new’ reek of familiarity, the off-product of a future so heavily routinized. Look deeply at the future, and it’s become just another start-up venture in the Internet age, scrambling for capital.”—Jack Hitt, in Mother Jones, March/April 2001.

Sleep on it!

Don’t cram. Instead, put the books away and go to sleep, says one new study. . . . People who stay up studying show little improvement in their performance. In a four-day study where half of the participants were kept awake the first night, those who slept the first night performed better overall, while those with no sleep showed no improvement.

—Adapted from an article in Psychology Today, March/April 2001.

Women of Law?

In the year 2000, more women than men were accepted into law school. More that 40% of law students since 1985 have been women, yet women make up only 15.6% of partners in major law firms.

—From Ms., April/May 2001

Shall we stay home today?

“‘It’s possible right now for a professor to give a lecture in Cairo, for me to attend that lecture here at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and for another student to attend it in Tokyo. If we can do all that, and the demographics of higher education are changing so greatly, why do we need the physical plant called the college?’ says Arthur Levine, president of CU’s Teachers College.... Already, more than half of the nation’s colleges and universities deliver some courses over the Internet. Dozens offer bachelor's and master’s degrees entirely online via a virtual education company called eCollege.

... “What excites online entrepreneurs is the prospect of turning college courses into prepackaged “content” that can be marketed and sold—for a profit—over the Internet.... It’s an enthralling idea, yet a troubling one. A growing number of educators fear that commercial rather than pedagogical considerations are driving the distance-learning trend.... Little is known about the actually quality of the online educational experience.”

—Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn, in Mother Jones, January/February 2001.