Prof. Faruq Siddiqui likes telling his Swarthmore students about a young woman who collapsed after one of his classes. He pretends his lecture caused it, and only later admits she was under the weather at the time. All jokes aside, though, Siddiqui takes visible pride in teaching a killer course. Students refer to his Mechanics class as “boot camp.” And he’s not the only drill sergeant on duty on American campuses.
At Princeton, Prof. Robert George’s Constitutional Interpretation is notorious for its dense readings, knotty paper topics and low grades. George gave more F’s than A’s in 2003-04, and the class average usually hovers between a B-minus and C-plus. Prof. Charles Pirtle, at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, seems to enjoy making life miserable in Map of the Modern World. Doors are locked the minute class starts, and student aides patrol the aisles to make sure no one eats, drinks or talks. Pirtle’s class is mandatory, but why do students flock to others like it? Sometimes it’s the challenge. Sometimes it’s a legendary teacher. And sometimes, apparently, the kids are just gluttons for punishment.
NAKED AMBITIONS
Harvard administrators blushed crimson early in 2004 when a student-faculty steering committee voted to fund a student-run sex magazine. Then The Harvard Crimson called it a “porn magazine.” Finally, during May finals, the magazine’s editors, film student Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg and history-of-science major Camilla Hrdy unveiled the maiden issue of H Bomb, featuring erotic fiction, poetry and nude photos of undergrads (h-bomb.org). “We wanted to create a magazine that dealt with sex,” says Hrdy. “Not just the act, but the context of it.” Whether issue No. 1 qualified as porn is debatable. But take heart, erotica lovers: the editors hope to publish twice a year.
THE BIG WORLD
Too often, students forget what college is for: exploring. Some get so focused on preparing for corporate life (business is the most popular major in the country) that they ignore subjects like history and the arts–thereby missing valuable lessons in human nature that could enhance their lives and actually boost their careers. (The best employers are looking for hires who can bring original ways of thinking to the job.) Other students go to the opposite extreme, refusing to face the prospect of life after graduation. A visit to the campus career center can be useful for anyone–seniors, freshmen or prospective students. Check out the research facilities for job seekers and which workshops are offered. You might discover unexpected things about the path that’s right for you.
PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE
The Greeks still aren’t history. Fraternity (and sorority) rosters plunged in the early ’90s. “The Me Generation wasn’t so interested in the group aspect,” says Peter Smithhisler, vice president of the North-American Interfraternity Conference. But student attitudes then changed. Although the current tally of some 350,000 undergrads in American fraternities is still down from the 1980s peak of 400,000, Smithhisler says membership has climbed steadily for the past decade: students “now have interests similar to those provided by fraternities–service, outreach, connectedness.” The trend also emerges in UCLA’s annual survey of freshmen. In January 2004, pollster Alexander Astin reported that the study’s respondents had continued a decadelong trend of “record-setting volunteerism,” with 83.1 percent doing volunteer work during their last year of high school.
MARCHING ON
Campus protest isn’t dead, but like many ’60s survivors, it has settled down. Some activists say mass mobilizations are difficult now because so many splinter groups compete with each other. Still, there are plenty of experienced organizers on campus. The trick is to get marchers on their feet. Kate Fulton, a recent Barnard grad, regrets that students didn’t do more for women’s rights while she was there. “It was an activist atmosphere, but not enough people got involved,” she says. If fixing the world were easy, it wouldn’t need fixing.
IT BEGAN AS THEIR CAMPUS
Every school in America is built on land once owned by their ancestors. But now Native Americans are among the tiniest, poorest and most underrepresented minorities on U.S. campuses–and their dropout rate is crippling. “They come with a strong sense of community, and when they get to college, that’s what’s lacking,” says Mellor Willie, 27, a Navajo visiting fellow at Harvard’s Native American Program. How can schools help reservation-raised students adapt to campus life? Oregon’s Portland State has a new $4.5 million Native American center. The University of South Dakota runs a special summer acculturation program. And San Diego State offers year-round tutoring for Native American high schoolers. It’s a kind of homecoming.
FEELING LUCKY?
A slave-wage campus job isn’t the only way to raise cash. One alternative is to copy former Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page: start your own company. They struck gold by creating the search engine Google, but you may want to aim a bit lower. “Find something that everyone wants and provide it at a price they’re willing to pay,” advises Rieva Lesonsky, editorial director of Entrepreneur magazine. “You can run anything on a computer out of your dorm room.” Paul Baker, 20, a finance major at Penn’s Wharton School, cofounded CollegeDeck.com in 2003. The online textbook exchange didn’t make him rich, he says, but it did save him more than $700 on books and earned him a summer job at a venture-capital firm. Don’t count on getting much sleep, and recognize the risk that your business might go bust anyway. If that happens, you can still learn from the experience–and be glad you’re young.
