Ways to make the most of an education
Welcome back to Santa Cruz, UC students — and if you're here for the first time, all the better. I hope you have a decent place to sleep and enough to eat, and that someone will forward this link to you as I doubt that you subscribe to this newspaper or have its app on your phone. I thought it worthwhile to write to you on the chance that what I have to offer may be a useful alternative to conventional academic or career counseling and may call into question some of your assumptions and invite you to rethink some of your choices. Whatever your year of study and whatever your major, please consider the following suggestions as ways to advance and enhance your education.
• Take humanities. Despite the latest trends in bottom-line utilitarian thinking that devalue literature, history, philosophy, art and other humanistic disciplines as worthless in the commercial marketplace, I would argue, with anecdotal but persuasive evidence from people I've known in business, in medicine, in law, in public health, in nonprofit work — in any field in which human behavior figures — that familiarity with enduring works and the ethical issues they examine gives depth to anyone's understanding of almost any personal or professional situation. Even techies, technocrats, scientists and environmentalists can benefit from exposure to the beauty of human accomplishments, the horror of human barbarism and the drama of moral corruption. Reading is not a surefire ticket to wisdom, but engagement with timeless ideas and themes can open your mind in enlightening ways.
• Question authority. Resist indoctrination. Be skeptical. Some of your professors, subject to current trends in the liberal arts and social sciences, may attempt to impose their ideological slant, spur you to activism or recruit you into their movement. The principles they espouse may sound noble but don't inevitably lead to their intended outcomes — justice, peace, equity, virtue — because the nuances and complexities of social and economic relations may prove to be richer and more ambiguous than mere righteousness allows for. Think for yourself, work for what you believe in, demonstrate as needed, but don't forget to interrogate your own beliefs. “Doubt and imagination go together,” I once heard the great Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes say. “Never believe what you think.”
• Stash your phone. As an exercise in psychic hygiene, establish periods of phonelessness — just a few hours a week, on a regular basis — to take a break from constant digital entanglement and learn to be fully present in the physical world and aware through your senses of ambient reality beyond all screens. Your devices are tools for you to use for your own purposes, means to ends, not ends in themselves. You are not their slave, and you have the power to reprogram your brain to remain engaged in the actual world with all its sensory and social information, not just their virtual simulacra.
• Commune with redwoods. The UCSC campus, between and beyond the buildings and despite the countless trees that have been sacrificed to make room for them, is a geophysical setting well worth exploring even without necessarily venturing into what's left of its wilder reaches. To find time, phoneless (see above), to sit on the soft duff in a circle of these ancient giants that have reached such heights even in their second generation, or to walk among them marveling at their majesty and smelling the oxygen-rich air they breathe, is to feel an awe that is an antidote to anxiety.
• Have conversations. However connected you may feel through your screens, there is nothing like face-to-face conversation with people you find some affinity with — maybe someone in a class who says interesting things or seems engaged with what engages you. Friendships made at this stage of life are sometimes sustained across many decades and miles of separation. Ideas and thoughts and curiosity, candidly exchanged, bonds formed now in this free-ranging stage of your intellectual appetite, can nourish you for a lifetime.