Nathan Hatch
University of Notre Dame, Opening Mass, 2004-2005 Academic Year
Most of you students consider a “C” actually a failing grade. While it is true that professors may be giving them out less, given grade inflation, when they do, one can hear the anguished cries, the gnashing of teeth. It is hard to accept that work has been deemed average. Aren't students at Notre Dame, like the children of Lake Wobegone , all “above average?”
We live in a culture that pushes all of us to excel. The worlds of law and medicine, investment banking and Ph.D programs require students to be at or near the top of the class. The business world idolizes dominant winners, like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. Television coverage of the Olympics is riveted upon those who win the gold, as if being second, third, or fourth in the world is hardly worth stopping to take notice.
In his new book about the American middle class, On Paradise Drive, David Brooks describes the quiet revolution in the way Americans are raising their children, what he calls the professionalization of childhood. Even grade school children are pushed into a culture of competition, with great attention to which school, what grades, and how many activities. “There exists, he says, “a massive organic apparatus for the production of children, a mighty Achievatron.” The message is loud and clear: Identity at any age is formed by what we do and accomplish.
Studies from the University of Michigan show that in the last fifteen years, grade school children spend less time in playing for fun in an unsupervised way. By contrast, time in organized sports has increased by 27 percent. General summer camps have declined in favor of those that promise to develop a specific skill: music, computers, video-making, basketball, or whatever. Parents can relax that even in the summer kids can improve themselves.
Much of this diligence and resume-building among young people is focused on the promised-land of college admissions––the milk and honey of a place like Notre Dame. But having made it to the school of one's dreams, do American students then relax? Hardly, Brooks concludes: “No, she kicks it up a notch. From the achievement-oriented movers and doers they were as teenagers, today's high-achieving Americans turn, once on campus, into Junior Workaholics of America. . . , going from one activity to another, from music to science to sports to community service to the library and do so without rest.”
Universities are communities that put the spotlight on exceptional persons. And we academics seem almost allergic to the condition of being average. Admission officers bend over backwards for the talented and gifted and fret about the average student, who doesn't raise SAT scores.
Department chairs and deans are always on the lookout for star teachers and researchers, for hiring people better than themselves. One recent book on good private universities is entitled “buying the best.”
On a personal level, a university like Notre Dame is an intimidating place. We are constantly facing peers who are more talented and accomplished than ourselves. Our own achievements pale by comparison.
The clear danger is to think of ourselves and others as important only as we accomplish things. Our value as human persons becomes pegged to what we can or cannot achieve. These attitudes put great pressure on ourselves and on how we view our peers. It is not surprising that, in the last decade, there is a huge increase in students who report feeling “frequently overwhelmed” by all they have to do. Many have the gnawing fear that their very worth is in jeopardy if they stumble on this treadmill of success.
As we begin a new academic year, which appropriately calls each us work to our full potential, let me offer two words of advice:
Your true identity does not derive from how successful you are. All of us, from the top of the class to the bottom, derive our tremendous worth because God, our creator, knows our name, calls us sons and daughters, and takes joy in our own unique gifts. Who you are does not rest on a fickle ability to write brilliantly, to solve the experiment correctly, or climb the organizational ladder.
My second word of advice is this: living in a pressure cooker of achievement, how do we view our neighbors. Our reactions are often twofold, to envy those who seem more gifted and to look past people who seem ordinary. In his recent book on envy, Joseph Epstein notes that envy runs high in the world of art and intellect. “How little it takes to make one academic sick with envy over the pathetically small advantages won by another: the better office, the slightly lighter teaching load, the fickle evaluation of students.”
What is the answer to resenting those who break the curve and ignoring others who seem uninteresting? In his essay, The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis asks us to attend to a proper theology of the human person. He challenges us with the awesome reality of the human person, bearers of the very image of God. “There are no ordinary people,” he concludes. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization––these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, exploit. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself,” he continues, “your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
In this academic community, during the coming year, may all of our work be leavened by this reality: Neither you nor your neighbor is an ordinary person.
