The Catch 22 of Liberal Arts

As I near my graduation from Middlebury College this May, I’m constantly assessing my value. I try and sift through the inner-ramblings to figure out what kind of person I am.

What do I bring to the metaphorical table?

What skills do I have as a job applicant?

What are my strengths?

What is most important to me?

What is my worth, and what are my principles?

The word value itself gets my head spinning. Value: relative utility, importance. Value: the monetary worth of something. Value: something (as a quality) intrinsically desirable.

In a way, these definitions inherently contradict one another. How can something be by nature intrinsic and simultaneously represent something meant to be placed on a spectrum by which other things are measured? It is this contradiction that makes it incredibly difficult to answer the many questions I have as an almost-graduate about to enter the workforce.

A thought experiment: Think of the values you hold dear — traits, characteristics, behaviors you aim to live by and seek in others. Now, place a value on them. What are they worth in terms of function, in terms of utility, monetary price?

Trick question. You can’t. Despite all the MasterCard advertisements in the World, the ‘priceless’ always comes with a pricetag, the tangible will always surmount its counterpart — partially, I’m convinced, because of its physicality.

In many ways, the world of Liberal Arts education embodies my inner struggle with the issue of value. I’ve undergone a schooling with a two-hundred thousand dollar price tag. I’ve been subject to efforts of mental expansion. I’ve become the product of a system that develops skills in students to make them apt for success in the world.

In many ways, it is the ‘intrinsic’ definition of value that Liberal Arts Education has been able to capitalize on, through successful marketing campaigns and thorough branding.

On paper and in pitches, liberal arts schools aim to provide an experience of inherent worth. Input high school graduates, output the ‘well-rounded’, the ‘lifelong-learner’, the ‘critical thinker’. All this, in theory.

In practice, however, liberal arts institutions like Middlebury College are not exempt from the system. Students will graduate, enter a world in which success is contingent on merit and tangible worth. In this world, we look to numbers. GPA’s, bullet points on resumés, test scores, hours clocked in the library. This world of tangibility provides an easy mechanism for sorting, categorizing, judging.

The accumulation of this data, however refreshingly simple, comes at a cost. Students silently battle to complete the longest to-do lists and have the least amount of free time. Time spent pursuing leisure is accompanied by guilt. It’s viewed as idle, contributing nothing toward the quota of concrete achievements. The culture of competitive busyness has become pervasive. The internal pressure we’ve put on ourselves to reinforce our tangible value has garnered the need to maintain a high level of constant production.

Initially, it was unclear to me whether this immense pressure to spread ourselves thin while maintaining a surface-level aura of keeping it together was some form of deranged overachiever-masochism characteristic of the student drawn to Middlebury-esque institutions. I’m convinced, however, that the root of the problem is systemic.

Our ‘elite’ education serves only to add fuel to the fire. Intentionally or not, institutions like Middlebury prepare us for the elite world, primarily by doing all they can to force us to cope with immense amounts of stress. While this skill undoubtedly has many future applications, I’m left pondering its one-dimensionality.

In Joseph Heller’s novel Catch 22, Dunbar excitedly exclaims, “There was something missing — and now I know what it is.” In the midst of war, a soldier discovers a paradoxical absence of patriotism. Imagine: striving toward a goal, only to find the essence of your effort lost.

I’ve always felt this way about my education, and I’m just now starting to put my finger on exactly why.

Here’s the irony: Attempting to prove our ability to complete the inhuman number of tasks we face weekly, we’ve lost perspective.

This year’s class will be graduating with a clear understanding of time-management and hard work. We’ll know how to get by on fumes, how to grind it out when it matters the most. We’re left knowing how to do a great number of things all at once — write papers, analyze hundreds of pages of reading, gruel over problem sets, study for exams — but have done so without much contemplation of their significance. I’m not sure we’ll know how to prioritize our lives on a larger scale in a world that’s much bigger and less forgiving.

Will we know how to take care of ourselves and each other? Will we be able to apply our knowledge productively and with meaning?

Herein lies the Catch 22: In the effort to achieve tangible value, there is an inherent denial of the intangible: intrinsic values such as balance, clarity, and direction.

As I write this, a month from graduation, I’ve been reflecting a lot on what these past four years have meant. I’ve become adept at time-management and hard work. I can handle more stress. I’ve met the challenges put forth by the neat system designed for us, and somehow survived.

In many ways, however, it is this fact that I’m leaving here, along with many of my peers, feeling like my greatest accomplishment has been just that — survival.