This is a note I sent to a fellow Case alumni who runs a “Young Adult Group” at the Unitarian church in Harvard Sq. We’ve been talking about our Case experiences, and it feels good for me to reflect on this now that it’s a few years behind me. I think I have a clearer picture of what I got out of my college experience. Karl and I will be leading a “spiritual discussion” for this UU group in November, and we’re thinking of focusing on some of these cultural/institutional issues in people’s lives. That is, if we can find a way to fit it under the “spiritual” heading. (hey, it’s a Unitarian church.. anything goes, right?)

Ethan,

Yes, my gripes are more cultural than educational. I can’t forget that I had some great professors at Case, and I believe I knew up from what kind of education I was in for. I don’t feel slighted in terms of academic opportunities; maybe Case had more dud profs than a “teaching institution,” but there are always horrible teachers.

The thing I didn’t expect was such an abysmal campus culture. People used their school books as shields (or crutches, depending on how you look at it) when asked to get involved in the community, but I never believed it was really about “too much studying.” I think there were deeply ingrained issues with the administration’s priorities and in the mix of personalities at the school. I’d always imagined that if students had more free time, they’d either be drinking more or playing more video games. And the crazy art students were a group too small who always left too soon. I remember meeting some people from CIA once and thinking, “Wow, where have -you- been all this time?”

Ethan, this was such a huge frustration for me. In a rather backwards way, instead of leaving the school I was so upset with, I set out to solve the Case Problem. And in an equally backwards way, a friend and I started a community web site called home.cwru.edu whose aim was to get people to step away from their desks and build a “real life” community. Some study had shown that a dorm-wide e-mail list encouraged people who were otherwise shy to get out for planned events, so we started from that. It was an interesting technical achievement and people still use it, but I think we failed at our original vision. At least it kept me occupied until I left, but my feeling now is that it would take a very special piece of software, one I’m not capable of writing, to really fix the Case Problem.

I did make lemonade from those four years: the community site got me a job, and the emptiness of the experience awoke me to so many things I had taken for granted when I was in high school and only missed once they were so far from the college culture: music, art, community, social activism, dating, eating well, dancing, living. Leaving Case, I’d come to realize the value of those things and I vowed to incorporate them more into my post-college life.

I’m still working on that, on the “recovery process”, as you put it, but I think I’ve come a long way.

best,
Carl