Word: cottoned
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There has been a disturbing trend in recent articles on this page--from Beth Stewart's detailing her unconscionable agenda (Feb. 3), to Tom Cotton's cheering selfishness, apathy and shortsightedness (Column, Feb. 18) to Josh Kaufman's describing our campus as appropriately the training ground of the social elite (Column, Feb. 20), columnists have been embracing the ivory tower we call home...
...course, as Cotton points out, not everyone is a complacent Rapunzel: the baneful progressives keep stomping around the tower demanding that the windows be unboarded, insisting that we think about people outside of the tower and remember that we are the lucky few. We would like to point out that not only do we need to notice the world outside of our decadent tower, but we need to recognize that it is fundamentally impossible to exclude oneself from society for four years of college. To pretend to do so is entirely unjustifiable...
...Cheer for Apathy" Tom Cotton assured us that it was not so much a belief of ineffectuality that renders students apathetic but a devotion to the experience of a liberal education and the selfless pursuit of medical school admission or a Wall Street position that leads students to "prudently choose their education over activism." The notion that a secluded liberal education is valuable, or even possible, stuns us. The proposal that one is best educated by avoiding ideology, activism, and community activity is patently ridiculous. It is a presumptuous fallacy to suggest that "education" is only attainable in wood-paneled...
Further, the notion that sitting in a Harvard dorm room studying 15 hours a day (as Cotton noted Thomas Jefferson allegedly did) prepares most students for anything other than a life of elitism and inaction is profoundly faulted. Where is the logic in supposing that people who contentedly spend four years doing nothing but classwork will suddenly rise from their undergraduate stupor and be ready (or qualified) to change the world? And where is the logic in supposing that it is possible to extricate oneself from society for long enough to graduate summa...
Thomas B. Cotton '98 is a government concentrator residing in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays...