Why I Probably Should't Write a Post about UVA

This is the first campus that I have simply walked off of.  This school is not for me.

I could probably end the post there, but I feel I owe it to you, dear reader, to explain myself a little better.  Firstly, it's huge.  I've been looking at schools with between 2,000 and 11,000 students; UVA has 21,000 students on campus.  That's all in round numbers, but I think the difference is significant.  That kind of number severely impacts the campus ambiance.  Which is to say that UVA feels really impersonal.  Admittedly, I had just come from a tour of Duke with a very popular freshman and from W&L where the Speaking Tradition mandates that you say hi to everyone you see; but it is still ridiculous to me that one wouldn't say hi to people.  That's just who I am and I saw none of that at UVA.  The info session leader talked about an Honor Code at UVA similar to that of Davidson, Wake, and W&L, but I don't believe that it could possibly be implemented on a campus that size.  Why?  Because people suck, that's why.  Out of 21,000 people, there are bound to be a few bad eggs that have never been caught before.  They'll get in, and they'll ruin it for the rest of us.  The info session was also really uninformative.  I sat in for 35 minutes of a 45 minute info session, and I learned nothing useful about the college.

So, yeah. That's pretty much it.  I will not be applying to UVA.

@georgeandbob

That's the Washington and Lee (hereafter to be referred to as W&L) admission office's twitter account.  Follow it.  It's pretty hilarious.

Setting aside awesome tweeting, I want to go to W&L.  That is a statement I make with one distinct reservation, but I'll get to that in a second.  First off, the campus is steeped in history.  From the little things like the fact that George Washington's original donation of $20,000 in stock of the James River Company still pays for $1.87 of every student's tuition and the plaques around campus commemorating Traveler (Lee's horse) set up and maintained by the Virginia Daughters of the Confederacy to big things like the Speaking Tradition and the Honor Code, W&L maintains it's history in a really cool, modern way.  The academics are also top notch, but that almost goes without saying.  I got the opportunity to skim the classes offered in the Religion Department (a department I am particularly interested in) and I pretty much wanted to take all of them.  They also have a strong technical theater program.  My stage tech teacher is actually a W&L alumnus, and he's awesome at tech and as a person, which is what actually steered me toward the university in the first place.  W&L is a university, but their only graduate program is their law school which only has 400 people in it; so the focus really is on the undergrads.  Everyone I've heard from has spoken to the fact that the professors and the students are really close, which is really nice.  The professors are also pretty legit themselves.  I was skimming some of the literature I picked up on the Physics department (another one of my interests) and I learned that the author of my school's AP Physics C textbook is a professor there.  That's pretty damn cool.  I also really love the campus ambiance.  The Honor Code and the Speaking Tradition are huge parts of that.  The Honor Code has its roots in Lee's declaration that the only rule of the school was that the students should "conduct themselves like gentlemen".  Nowadays, that is interpreted to mean "I will not lie, cheat, or steal" or violate the trust of the campus in any way.  Conviction of an Honor Code violation is grounds for immediate expulsion.  Clearly this is taken very seriously.  But it's not like there are expulsions every year.  The student body takes the Code very seriously and really doesn't violate it.  Which, in the grand scheme of things, means that they are decent human beings, but that's no small feat in today's world.  There's also the Speaking Tradition, which also dates back to Lee's tenure as president of the university.  It boils down to the fact that you say hi to people you see.  No matter what. Again, this probably should be considered basic human decency, but it really is exceptional that the students do this.

I could go on and on about the things I love about the campus and all the little stories about the history of the university, but I want to address one glaring "question mark" area: Greek Life.  I am not what one would consider a stereotypical sister; some people call me a hipster, but I reject labels.  Participation in Greek Life at W&L hovers around 85%.  On a campus of approximately 2,000 people total.  It's kind of a big deal.  I am assured that you're not screwed out of the social scene if you are not involved and I am assured that the sororities and fraternities are not stuck up about who's who, but still.... 85%.  That's a lot.

All in all, I loved Washington and Lee.  It's the first school about which I have actively said "I want to go here".  I embrace the trident that is the university's symbol; it's just that there is one significant pointy bit.

Eruditio et Religio

Go Blue Devils!  Tuesday saw a visit to Duke University, a fine example of gothic architecture.  In fact a very familiar kind of gothic architecture.  James Buchanan Duke was told by the Princeton Administration that he could not simply buy their university, so he went and built his own in Durham, North Carolina.  That is not something you learn on the tour; that is something you learn from an alumnus.  An alumnus like my dad.  And he is proud of it.  Which is slightly adorable.

Anyway, I really liked Duke.  We started off with a very informative info session, which was followed by a very passionate walking tour. Our guide was a freshman, so he was maybe not the best informed; but boy could you tell he was excited to be at Duke.  Personally, I don’t feel like I missed out on much because my dad was liberal with his asides to me regarding his college experience. 

But I do have to get something out of the way before I extol the virtues of Duke’s academics and athletics. Well, two somethings.

1.  They have the original lemur from Zaboomafoo.  For those of you who also grew up watching that show, you understand why that’s awesome.
2.  THEY HAVE A HOLODECK.

With regard to the second point, it’s technically an immersive virtual environment not a holographic environment; but I don’t care. Duke has a holodeck.  That makes the trekkie in me very, very happy.

With regard to less nerd-tastic aspects of the campus, I’m going to throw down a statistic and be done with how excellent the academics are.  99% of applicants to law school from Duke get in.  There is no pre-law program. I know, you’re thinking to yourselves “What is this madness?!”  Duke is just that cool.  Athletically, just Google Coach K, I’ll wait.  Note, you probably don’t have to, because if you haven’t heard of Duke Basketball you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10+ years.   When my dad went to school here, Duke was the best school no one had ever heard of.  But he was class of ’76. Things have changed since then.  Now everyone knows Duke is awesome.  A few of my friends hadn’t heard of Wake and Davidson; they had all heard of Duke.

How Much Nowhere Would You Like?

Alenda Lux Ubi Orta Libertas or Pro Humanitate?  These are the questions I pose myself.


My spring break college odyssey began with a mad dash from the Charlotte Airport to Davidson College in Davidson, NC.  This is the first degree of isolation.  It's about 30 minutes from Charlotte, which is a major metropolis, to campus, but you wouldn't know it. Which is awesome.  I flat out love Davidson.  The tour began with a visit to the Belk Visual Arts Center that emphasized the fine arts requirement.  I am not a fine artist, so I won't stress it the same way they did, but Davidson seems to take art seriously.  Also, they have an original Rodin in the atrium.  Lucky for me, this art requirement can be satisfied in the performing arts (read: with stage tech), otherwise they'd have to prepare themselves for a concentration in stick figures.  With regard to the theater, it's gorgeous.  The college itself was founded as an all-male agrarian college, and - while it has evolved in nature - it has not much evolved in size.  Davidson is tiny.  But it seems to make up for it's physical size with history.  On the "Historic Quadrangle" are the Eumenean and Philanthropic Halls, home to the literary/debate societies at the college.  They stand about 50 feet apart and debates are conducted from their respective balconies.  Allegedly, Woodrow Wilson gave his first public address for the Eumenean Society in this format.  Did I mention President Wilson went here as an undergrad?  Because I think he's awesome.  He’s up there among my favorite presidents (don’t think I’m a dork for having favorite presidents).  Anyway the next stop on our tour was a quick walk through the sciences building.  There is a lab science requirement at Davidson, but the labs are capped at 32.  There are no TAs at Davison.  Every class is taught by a professor and, because they are pretty much all tiny, the students get to develop a really personal connection with their teachers.  If you really do want to get off campus to learn, Davidson has a very active study abroad program.  The programs that the college runs itself are somewhat limited, but it seems that if you really want to go somewhere, they will find you a program that runs through another university that will suit your needs.  Also awesome at Davidson is the laundry system.  In addition to a 24-hour student Laundromat that is free of charge and wifi connected (you can go online to see if machines are available and set things up such that you will receive a text message when your laundry is done), there is a Laundry service center that will wash, dry, press, and fold your laundry for you in a few days.  Which is awesome.  In terms of application, Davidson accepts all the usual stuff and asks that you fill out a “Why Davidson?” supplemental essay.  They also ask for a friend’s letter of recommendation, which is kind of interesting.  By friend they don’t mean teacher with whom you’ve bonded.  They mean actual friend who’s a peer.  As the saying goes: show me who you walk with and I’ll tell you who you are.  To sum up the experience of the “Davidson Family/Mafia”, our guide shared with us a seriously cool story about the last time Davidson made it to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championships.  In 2008, the Wildcats made it to Detroit and a bunch of alumni agreed to pay for transportation, rooms, and tickets for any Davidson student that wanted to go.  They bet on about 100; they got pretty much the entire student body.  But they stuck to their word and paid for everyone to go.  Which is an amazing display of school spirit, both on the part of the students and on the part of the alumni.  That, in a nutshell, is why I loved Davidson.

After Davidson, my dad and I drove another hour or so to Winston-Salem, one of three municipalities in the US that is legally written with a hyphen.  Winston-Salem is home to Wake Forrest University, the second stop on my spring break visit schedule.  Unfortunately the student body was on spring break, so we got an extra-in-depth info session and a pamphlet that outlined a self guided walking tour.  Thanks to the info session leader, I honestly don’t feel like I missed out on anything.  He did a really good job of giving us the personal experience side of the walking tour that we would have missed out on otherwise.  I think some of his enthusiasm came from the fact that Wake served as his first, first-hand experience of the states (he lived his youth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), but he was really excited about Wake.  Interestingly, Wake does not mandate that you send your standardized test scores.  If you feel that your test scores from one Saturday at 8 AM are representative of your academic abilities, then send them in.  Otherwise, they’re more interested in your career and grades in High School.  Wake is a University - as opposed to Davidson, which does not have a graduate program - but the classes are still kept small and are still taught by full professors.  TAs sometimes run review sessions for tests, but the professors keep office hours and keep themselves available.  And I can say from personal experience that they’re a nice bunch.  Just because the students were on break doesn’t mean the teachers were.  On our self-guided walking tour, my dad and I ran into the professor of technical theater in the Wake Forest “black box”.  This is the guy that runs the side of theater I’m interested in.  I was just poking my nose into their secondary theater space, I ran into him, and he took my dad and I on a tour of the main-stage space and the shop.  He was very excited to inform us that they’ll be getting some LED fixtures for the main-stage space and are looking to renovate the theater to make it bigger.  I also picked up a copy of the student run newspaper The Old Gold & Black and was quite impressed.  They had a feature on a speaker that recently came to campus to discuss religious freedom and tolerance.  I found this feature particularly interesting because of my particular interest in religious studies.  I think I ought to start picking up more of these student newspapers…

On a more cultural note, I have learned a few things about the south:

1. 1It is not abnormal to see churches along the highway as often as you would see a Starbucks in NYC.
2. Brown Sugar and Mayonnaise go on everything

Shout out to Simplyummy in Winston-Salem for a delicious grilled cheese sandwich.  I had no idea that Brown Sugar could taste so good on a grilled cheese sandwich…

Tribes

As my teachers will attest, I do not like feeling like I have missed something.  I am well known for coming in for extra help regarding topics that I know full well will be elucidated in the next class.  So perhaps you can imagine my opinion of a play that centers on the concept of missing things.  Nina Raines's Tribes at the Barrow Street Theater is that play.  An import from London's Royal Court Theater, this dramatic comedy is about passive and active listening and hearing.  And very probably about deciding who is the biggest ass in the show.  Because, to be perfectly honest, even the hearing characters don't hear each other.  Everyone lacks some ability to connect to the outside world and almost all of them fundamentally do not or cannot hear some majority of the other characters.  And the actors do an amazing job of acting it.  Really, that is very well done.  As is the scenic design.  Scott Pask has created a wonderfully neurotic living/dining room for the family whose interactions drive the play.  The problem is that the play they're driving is a rather heavy handed one.  It is pretty funny in the first act; it just gets preachy in the second.  The characters the actors inhabit are nothing new.  Dad is an academic critic who is never anything other than critical, mom is vaguely writing a "marriage breakdown detective novel", Daniel is writing a thesis (kind of), Ruth is trying to pursue a career singing arias in pubs, and Billy is generally a bystander to their cacophonous arguments because he's the deaf one.  On the surface they may seem unique, but there's not much to distinguish them from any of the dysfunctional families you’ve probably met before in fiction (like J. D.Salinger’s tales of the Glass family) or film (like Wes Anderson’s “Royal Tenenbaums”).  They're all pretending at some kind of significance and none of them are succeeding.  Only the actors seem to win in this show because they carry off these stereotypes as though they were in fact as new as the writer seems to think they are.  The ensemble really does an excellent job with a play that is heavy handed at best.  As staged by Mr. Cromer supertitles are projected during signed sequences, but irregularly, so sometimes we lose the thread. The in-the-round configuration for this production means that at different points different actors will have their backs to us. And you’re increasingly aware of the importance of where everyone is standing, how bright or dark the stage is (according to Keith Parham’s lighting) and how loud or muffled offstage noises are.  


All in all I think it was interesting.  I just can't say I enjoyed it.

Another Empowered Woman Assembly

I attend a college-preparatory day school for girls, so the "how to be an empowered woman" assemblies are nothing new; but I think they're really laying it on thick this year.  In any event, this last one was actually pretty good.  The Dr. Jane Berman Memorial Lecture Series kicked off with Dr. Jennifer Lawless.  Finally the powers that be have seen fit to give us an academic! I think that might be my problem with the vast majority of our empowering women lectures; they reek of propagandist agendas.  This lecture was balanced and accepted both sides of the argument.  This woman was neither a politician nor a journalist.  She was an academic!  And it was wonderful.

Dr. Lawless, a Ph.D in Political Science (the art of finding empirical evidence for the obvious) from Stanford, delivered a balanced lecture on why women don't run and why they should.  I'll give you a preview of why they should: it's not because we're just better at everything than men.  After surveying men and women regarding their political ambitions in the fields of law, business, activism, and education (the four fields most likely to breed political ambition), Dr. Lawless and her team observed a huge gender gap with regard to their political ambition.  After further surveying, she and her team were able to enumerate three main reasons that women don't run even though women do just as well as men when they run.

1. Family Responsibilities
2. Qualifications
3. Recruitment

With regard to family responsibilities, women are still about ten times more likely than men to be responsible for household duties.  Which is not to say that having family responsibilities precludes candidacy, but to say that it does make it more complicated.  It's essentially like having three jobs: whatever pays the bills, being a mother, and running a campaign.  That means that women tend to put off running until their children are out of the house, which (in our political system) means that they have to climb the ladder quickly, start higher, or be content to stay lower.  Which is not ideal to say the least.

Women are also more likely to doubt their qualifications.  They see the fact that less than 20% of elected offices are held by women, so they consider themselves a political anomaly, so they think they have to be way overqualified to hold office.  Lawless told a couple stories from her own political campaign in RI to illustrate this point.  Apparently, when she was running, she was worried that she would be considered under qualified because she was not actually from Rhode Island.  So she essentially memorized the RI almanac.  So, when a caller on a radio interview asked her what effect a ~10% job loss really had on the population of Rhode Island and "What is the population of Rhode ISland anyway?" she answered with the exact population of RI.  Which is kind of creepy.  The other story she told us actually kind of reinforced the idea that women have to be slightly more qualified to be successful. It has to do with look.  See, women in politics tend to look the same.  Which is to say mannish.  And it remains true that women have to meet a certain appearance bar to engage with the voters.  They both have to look really nice but also not too feminine.  Heels and highlights, combined with matte makeup and pants suits.  But, according to the statistics, in comparable campaign efforts women do just as well as men.  They loose just as often as men when running against incumbents and they beat non-incumbents just as often in elections for an open seat.

The third barrier to prospective female candidates is recruitment.  The best predictor of whether women will run is whether they've been told/encouraged to run.  This is kind of the one factor we can change.  Women are both much less likely to be encouraged and much less likely to respond to encouragement.  So basically the message of the lecture is it's never too early to start recruiting women to run.  I know you're all bracing yourselves for me to start ranting against feminism, but the next words out of Dr. Lawless's mouth made my heart smile.  According to her, it's totally ok if you decide not to run, you just need to be able to make the choice yourself.  Hallelujah!  Thank you for respecting that!  This is what we should be told, not "If you don't run/act like an empowered woman, you're a submissive fail and part of the problem that it is your duty to solve."  This speech was not a turn off for any ambitions that might be incubating in my brain.  Because I do kind of agree that we should see more women in politics.  For me it's a question of democratic legitimacy.  There is a slight majority of females in the population of the US, but they only hold about %20 percent of all elected offices.  That's not republicanism.  Since we've given women the right to vote, we should see them represented and representing in office.

The part 2 of this lecture was a screening of Miss Representation, but I didn't go to that even though it was mandatory.  It was production week for the musical and I had to be in the theater.  But I actually would have gone.  I was actually somewhat inspired by this lecture.  I haven't been inspired by an empowerment lecture in a long time...  

Contraception and Catholicism

Regardless of whether the issue has been resolved legally speaking as of this writing (and to my knowledge it has), a proposed mandate that religious institutions pay for female contraception has sparked a, let's say interesting, discourse in this nation at the center of which is the question "Does it violate my institutional religious freedom to be told that I must pay for contraception when the concept of contraception is against my religious beliefs?"  This, to my mind, is a fascinating question.  I would not normally tackle an issue like this because, in spite of my gender, I am not particularly interested in women's issues; however this one strikes me as important because this one, at its core, is political.  Purely and completely political.  Of course there is the issue of religious freedom, which I am all for.  I think it is one of the things that makes this country great.  The 1st and the 19th amendments are my favorites (don't think I'm a dork, I like freedoms and voting).  But, because of the language that this issue has taken on, the issue of institutional religious freedom versus personal religious freedom has become a political battle. Because The Church (by which I mean The Vatican or The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church) picks its battles in the secular arena.  In the social justice arena, the Catholic Church does, has done, and will very probably continue to do wonderful things.  Feeding, clothing, and sheltering the needy is a task that must be done and, when the federal government can't handle it, it is a task that is very often assumed by religious institutions.  However, we now see candidates in the Republican field who are either Catholic or supported by some Catholics who support the death penalty and/or have been divorced.  While St. Thomas Aquinas may have been resolutely in favor of the death penalty, that view has fallen somewhat out of favor of late.  Divorce is also generally accepted by the Catholic laity.  It happens in America.  It's as simple as that.  These are not issues that can be brought up as issues of doctrine because they happen in America.  The Catholic Church can't come out saying that we, as a nation, can't use the death penalty or grant divorces because it violates their religious freedom; yet Catholic institutions can come out and say that they refuse to pay for female contraception as part of their insurance plans for that reason.  It would seem that The Church has chosen it's battle ground.  And those who support this view seem to fight their battles with the language of persecution. It's like Rick Santorum saying that JFK's speech on religious tolerance made him throw up a little because he interpreted it to mean that people of faith have no place in the public arena.  This is simply not the case.  Some of our arguably best presidents would be completely unelectable today because of their perceived lack of faith and none of today's candidates would be electable 50-60 years ago because they talk about their faith too much (among other reasons).  No religion is persecuted in the United States of America.  Mocked? Sure.  People are terrible and intolerant.  But we as Americans do not persecute anyone.  We have come a long way, as people, from issuing the Jeremiads of the Puritan days.  Unfortunately, it seems our national discourse has regressed.  Ultimately, the question of contraception comes down to the golden rule.  An institution has a right to abide by its religious and moral convictions, but it cannot infringe on the rights of those who work for their institution who are not of the same faith.  Do unto others, man.  It's that simple.