Jason Tangson | Exhortation for exploration

When | We need to step back and see the greater picture

By Jason Tangson 02/22/15 11:56pm

What do expired yogurt and Penn have in common? The culture is toxic.

After a whole year of psychiatric fieldwork and rumination, Gutmann’s task force just dropped its debut bedside short-read “Report of the Task Force on Student Psychological Health and Welfare.” The 8,000-word-long report highlights what Bloomberg Business calls “Penn’s pressure cooker” environment in our shared inability to cope with imperfection, effecting an institutional malaise across the student body. To be anything less than five-star is fatal.

While the mental health problem is paramount, we must also realize that the anxiety against averageness is also limiting creativity.

Instead of intuition, our choices are tempered and tampered by our fear of not succeeding. These metrics of success rarely arise from our own organic origins, and instead come from being enveloped in Penn’s homogenous zones, which are aroused only by the touch of traditional success. We are too afraid to bleed for our true desires. This stifling reaction puts a damper on the libido of experimentation with the distracting thoughts of failure, and makes us too stiff to dabble in Pollockian spontaneity. In short, Penn suffers from performance anxiety.

We often forget that we are college students, that we are naive and that we still have some more time to develop.

This privilege is recognized almost universally; both people and cops spare an extra degree of leniency to college students. To put it bluntly, students can get away with things only at this time of their life. And we need to use this chance to the fullest potential.

Now, let me first be clear: I do not condone financial fraud, Wharton. I also do not condone murder — except for certain terrorists and similarly bad people — nor assault, rape, hate crimes or any similar traumatic event. But it is not in my place to judge; I’m an opinion columnist, not a legal ethicist.

What I mean is to flout the mores that have marked your life, to leave your comfort zone and leave it far behind. Only at the borders can you stretch. From brief stints with new things, be it Leninism or lesbianism, college is a Rumspringa, an environment to experiment. Wharton, Nursing and Engineering have more rigid requirements and invariably stiff schedules, so this may not apply as staunchly, sorry.

The luxury of being a student is the clemency to commit risky behavior with the assurance that, ultimately, everything will be fine. Physically, this may be realized as the ability to binge drink, but I mean noetically.

The task force’s report nebulously calls for “cultural, not structural changes.” To narrow down the Areciboian scope just a bit more, I believe that Penn bureaucracy can do this by first affording its students more freedom to experiment.

We can do this by loosening the tight rigidity of academics; many classes at Harvard and Yale meet for only two hours per week, contra to Penn’s three, allowing for more time for extracurriculars and personal projects, such as start-ups like the Facebook. Brown’s “open curriculum” — the lack of any course requirements — makes it an intellectually free-range campus, and peckish students often find kernels of passion where they’d least expect it. A faculty committee at Princeton recently recommended kicking grading on the curve to the curb, finding it to interfere with psychological factors and campus atmosphere.

We also need to stop comparing ourselves to other institutions, and instead learn to appreciate our merits for their own. At Penn, most students are above average, warping expectations. This arms race fuels the cultural myopia that normalizes high-stress high-achieving as the baseline, leading to a sink or swim ultimatum, where either choice is inevitably exhausting. We need to step back and appreciate the tranquility of life; for me, field trips into West Philadelphia have been meditative.

Because at the end of the day, death is the great equalizer.

JASON TANGSON is a College junior from Cambridge, Mass., studying linguistics. His email address is tjason@sas.upenn.edu.

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