Welcome to College: You Are About to Enter an Open Relationship

By Prof. Steve Gimbel

Flip open the shiny viewbook for any college and look at the pictures of students outside in exotic places; students with goggles and lab coats in front of Erlenmeyer flasks full of brightly colored liquids, a kindly faculty member behind them slightly out of focus; students on stage and at conferences giving presentations; students in business dress clothes on internships…

What you never see is a picture of students in a classroom. Sure, there’s the one shot of a cool professor holding class outdoors under a tree or on the library steps on a beautiful day, but what is missing from the picture in your mind they want you to form of what we do in college is what we actually do in college. When you look at the way colleges market themselves to high school juniors and seniors, what is shocking to those of us who spend our lives here is how little of what we do is present in the image of what we do. As someone who teaches ethics, the concerns about truth in advertising are real. You show up with a fake sense of what we are and what we do.

To be fair, the people who put those books together are salespeople (the admissions folks would HATE to hear that, but it’s true) and what sells is “look how exciting and different we are!” But this comes with a presupposition — an unspoken belief that is never explicitly stated, but which has to be accepted for the new claim to make sense.

In this case, the presupposition is “classrooms are boring.”

Classrooms are boring and most of what we do is in classrooms, so if we show you what we really do, you won’t want to come here. The pictures in the viewbooks are like dressing up for a first date, trying to convince the person you are taking out that you are more interesting and active than you really are so he or she might want to go out with you again.

But eventually, that person figures out who you really are. Indeed, if you see each other for four years, you have to learn who each other really are. So, now that you and Gettysburg College are committed to a long-term relationship, let’s be honest with each other. Successful relationships are built on honesty.

First, as a college, we are seeing other students.

I know that’s not a shock, but we should be clear that this is an open relationship. It doesn’t mean that we care about you any less. We chose you and you chose us because we really like each other and think it would be fun to spend time together. We have a lot in common. You know, if you want to see another institution during the summers, we’re fine with that and give you credit for seeking that out (well, we may give you credit — see the registrar to make sure). We even encourage you to go abroad and spend some quality time with an attractive university elsewhere. We have an office dedicated to finding the right match for you when you go away. Look at the pictures, find someplace you like, and bon voyage. We’ll talk about it when you get back.

Second, we will cook the meals and will clean the dishes.

We know you have a lot of work to do and we are willing to take care of some of the domestic chores to give you the time you need.

Finally, we do like to go out and do exciting things…occasionally.

But mostly, we’re homebodies. What we really like to do is to stay in, sit around, and talk. I know this may not sound exciting, but, trust me, we talk about some really interesting shit. And, yes, in college, we can say “shit.” We can say whatever we think we need to say. We have this thing called “academic freedom” which lets us say whatever we need to however we need to in order to do our job. And our job is to poke and prod everything we can think to talk about.

The classroom may not be the most photogenic place, but, hey, you try to get a picture of a mind being blown and see how it comes out.

The conversations we will have together in the classrooms will change you.

They will undermine your sense of reality.

They will challenge long-held beliefs about the way things are and have to be.

Okay, honesty — some of them will be boring, but those are the ones setting the stage. It’s like when you have to see your relatives’ pictures of their vacation to someplace. But once you have seen the pictures, you can ask hard and interesting questions about the place, about what it is to travel, about why this is a place worth going and whether or not you could see yourself there. Your professors have all been to amazing places (some of them actual places, some of them intellectual places) and we have LOTS of pictures to show you of our mental and physical travel and, yes, some of them are more interesting than others. But the point is that they prepare you for your own journey and that is the part of the relationship where you grow and change.

We’re not getting married. We’re just going to live together for four years before you go off to live the rest of your life. But in these four years together we will change you and you will change us. The relationship needs your full buy in and we promise to give you everything we can to help you grow and become the person you are going to be when you go out and change the world.

Steve Gimbel is a philosophy professor at Gettysburg College.