A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about what I variously described as
my quarter-life crisis and/or existential meltdown, the point in my early 20s when I realised how ill-suited I was for the degree I was pursuing, law, and how I was, at the age of 20, convinced that I had essentially wasted my life. Well, in happy news, last week I actually graduated. From law. Eight and a half years after starting it. And five years after deciding that I would rather hang from the ceiling by my scrotum than step foot inside a law firm. Here's photographic proof:
The fact of my finishing might seem like a grand exercise in stubbornness and/or stupidity, and it's certainly well beyond arguing that I had anything except the most morbid of interests in the concept of law by the end. In my final semesters I'd sit in lectures, desperately bored or quietly fuming, trawling through page after of
Julia Segal's magnificent time-waster of a Tumblr, thousands of dollars worth of high grade education washing past me as I got way too excited by GIFs like this:
I had law reduced down to a series of simple formulas, mechanisms by which I could skip lectures, avoid readings and in general do as little as was humanly possible, and then at the end copy and paste text from lecture overheads straight into a Word document, bring it into one of the heavily weighted open book exams and pass. Not excel, mind, but definitely pass. Certainly, not the most intellectually edifying way of going about things, but it achieved what it had to. Which was get me a degree I despised.
But despite the many frustrations of being forced to study something so detached from myself, I could not possibly say I feel any regret over the way things panned out. In some ways this might be due to a certain degree of confirmation bias: these are matters of personal history and one gains little from supposing how else they might have been. But I think it also burrows a bit deeper than that, toward one of the broader truths of pursuing further education, and indeed, the sum experience of post-adolescence.
To explain: I'm always a little uneasy when I read reports on
how little time students are spending on campus these days. A combination of expanded living pressures and working hours for students and the steadily extending reach of technology means actual attendance at a campus is becoming increasingly redundant. A few years back, I had two friends who deliberately enrolled in a law unit with a 100% exam, didn't attend a single class and then at the end jammed through a semester's worth of lecture recordings and PowerPoint presentations in two days and both picked up distinctions. While it shows a certain degree of wherewithal on their parts, that strikes me as a pretty hazy model of education. Technology is an excellent facilitator - and it certainly aided and abetted the academic shortcuts I pursued in the final stages of my degree - but there was so much texture to my years at university, so many elements that went beyond the mere fact of passing units, manipulating information and getting a piece of paper at the end, that the prospect of people coasting through their degrees without ever really interacting with their fellow students or the institution at large makes me, well, a little sad.
Because for me that was the redeeming feature in all of this, amidst the petty and grand frustrations, the dissatisfaction with my academic experience, the oft-stated hatred for my field of knowledge: university was a significant life event. It shaped everything that came after, even if it did so largely in the negative of what I was actually studying. Writing for uni publications led to jobs like this one right here. Writing plays for the University Dramatic Society with two friends (in order Smerfs (sic), Captin Planet (sic) and Tertles (sic) - Chekhov this wasn't) led to careers in comedy and the media. A year on the Guild Council led to me never, ever getting involved in politics ever again. Ever. Going on exchange taught me how to travel and made me pull my head out of my ass and start to grow up. Friends are pretty great. We still hang out. Alcohol, drugs, sex: also important. The experiences that existed outside of my lectures were multitudinous and varied, and, not to be too trite, actually ended up being the education I craved.
I make no claim that such things can only happen at university; uni was merely the place where they happened for me. But at a time when higher education is increasingly seen merely as a degree factory for the production of easily employable technocrats, I think it's worth reconsidering what else it is that these fabulated institutions can still achieve.
Even if we have to drag kids onto campus by force...