Why “Fresh Kills”
In Fall of 2017, I had the great honor of working with an outstanding group of college freshmen: the incoming cohort of the Purdue University Northwest-Westville Honors College. Throughout the semester, I got to learn from and think with a group of 18 diverse, interesting, ambitious, practical, funny young people from Northwest Indiana.
The course in question is called Honors Cohort I, and it’s a first-year experience course for the Honors College. It’s designed to introduce students to college-level thinking and writing, and to get them engaged in some serious, detailed planning for their college years and their careers and lives beyond. Since one of our goals in the Honors College is to get students into research in a wide variety of ways, we focused a lot on how to assess and synthesize sources, how scholars think and communicate, and how to write about one’s research for both public and academic audiences.
A lot of our work this semester was focused around how we define success: as a society, and as individuals; in our careers, and in our lives; in the U.S., and across the world. My students all completed an assignment lovingly known in the Honors College as “The Success Project”: an intensive, detailed ten-year plan accompanied by an introspective reflection on their individual values and goals. My students plan to become physical therapists, computer engineers, grant writers, labor and delivery nurses, environmental activists, accountants, and industry leaders. They also want to have fulfilling lives: to work to promote their values, to contribute to their communities, to build families and homes for themselves. All of these plans and ideas go into the Success Project.
But we also spent some time reflecting on the cost of our success. As part of PNW’s One Book One University program, we read Edward Humes’s Garbology, a moving tale of how we in the U.S. have structured our society to hide the growing problem of trash from ourselves, allowing us to go along our merry way in this consumerist society without dealing with the environmental impact of our consumption habits. This book challenged us: how, as ethical adults, can we plan for successful futures, when our country’s economic success itself generates an impossibly large negative impact on the world? We struggled to think through these real and difficult issues.
It began to be clear that garbage is part of the dark underbelly of success. As we read and thought about issues like global warming, pollution, income inequality, racism, and gender discrimination, it became clear to us that we can’t plan for our own success as individuals without also thinking about these systemic problems that we inevitably contribute to and are affected by. We can’t solve these problems ourselves, and we can’t just give up in despair. But what we can do is to try our best to live ethical lives, to think deeply about the broad consequences of our choices, and to stay engaged with these issues and problems in our lives and our careers.
And that’s where our title, Fresh Kills, comes from. Fresh Kills is a massive landfill for New York, located on Staten Island. It’s one of the few man-made things so big it can be seen from the Earth’s orbit, as Humes tells us in his introduction. That’s right: China produced the Great Wall; the U.S. produced a gigantic landfill. But the story of Fresh Kills is not without hope: the landfill is now being transformed into wetlands and a park space that will eventually be three times as large as Central Park. Fresh Kills symbolizes “success” in all of its complexity: achievement, its costs, and what we can do to make our own success better for the world.
My students experimented with writing for a broad-based digital platform by considering these questions. Regan James Sink, Baylee Adryan Carpenter, Nikole Lyn Brashear, Annabelle Lynn Engel, ashley mcdaniel, and Kaitlyn Sue Zickmund tracked the amount of trash they generate and figured out modest steps they can take, as individuals, to reduce their garbage footprint. (And along the way we made some….discoveries about their eating habits, which led me to bring a tray of raw vegetables to our end-of-semester party. Not incidentally, one of our class members, Davina Jackson, wrote a research paper on the connections between garbage and nutrition.)
These students also did some insightful thinking about success. disneygirl composed a series of essays about how shyness can affect one’s success, with lots of practical suggestions for how the shy student can overcome obstacles. Ian C Norris thought about how depression and social media interact to shape our views of success. Brandon William Fetters explored the difference between internal and external motivation in our ideas about success.
Several of our students investigated the diversity of approaches to success. Arielle Malavolta, who is completing her training as a volunteer firefighter, wrote about what success means to first responders. Davina Jackson focused specifically on the employees of a nonprofit agency, to determine what success means to people whose day job is to help people who are down on their luck. Carlos Naranjo did some fascinating interviews with immigrants to the US to explore their perspectives on success. The dynamic duo of Rachel Rock and Porter Minix wrote a hilarious account of their opposed approaches to success, based on their respectively pessimistic and optimistic outlooks. Brittany Williams talked to people from a diverse range of ages to explore their definitions of success, while Lily Janine Baldwin and kait © did the same thing, but with people from different economic classes. Their results were surprising — go check out their articles for yourself.
And then there’s Hayden Dale Leydens, who might not be an English major, but still geeked out over whether or not Reddit comments meet the standards of academic discourse.
To my Honors 111 class: I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to work with you, and I’m so proud of how each of you has grown over the course of the semester. I can’t wait to see what you all will achieve over your careers.
And to our readers: enjoy our work. We’ll see you in the comments.
