Metaphor as Illness: The Epidemic, The Apocalypse, and Students

Below is a passage from a popular book published several years ago. It speaks to what many perceive as the sickness that surrounds the whole process of students applying for admission to highly selective colleges and universities.

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Why’d you go back east? I said.

I got a scholarship to Dartmouth. My uncle went there.

Were you an only child?

She shook her head. Twin brother. He died when we were fifteen. Motorcycle.

Man.

I had good grades. Good test scores. I was going to be a vet, go to Colorado State, come back home and set up a large animal practice. All my life that was what I was going to do. We had a college counselor, Mr. Sykes. He had a very good placement record, but he controlled who went where so tightly all the kids called him Sucks. One day in English class my junior year there was a tap on the glass of the door and he came in and handed me a folded note. It said My office 12: 45. During the lunch hour. I remember we were talking about The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Do you know it?

I loved that poem until they taught it to me in high school.

Did you know there is a Hidden Meaning?

Really?

Yup. Sex, art and scholarship are all class weapons.

Hunh. Funny thing to teach aspiring scholars.

We weren’t aspiring scholars. We were supposed to go to work for StorageTek or UPS. Or Coors.

The note. Sykes, I said.

Oh. My heart galloped. Every year Dartmouth gave one scholarship to a kid from Delta High. It was endowed by the man who built the fiberboard plant, an alum. I guess he felt bad for all the formaldehyde smoke which reeked in the winter when there was an inversion. Every fall one kid got a note from Sykes to see him at lunch hour. He controlled it, chose the kid. I don’t think that was even legal but that’s the way it was. His little fiefdom. Kept all the families, the whole town, kissing his ass all year. For the rest of the class nobody could concentrate, they were all watching me. And my head was rushing with the possibilities, images of a future I had no pictures for. They tumbled together: ivy covered bricks, handsome upperclassmen in argyle sweaters, taking them off to row crew.

You know I didn’t have a clue. My days consisted of throwing hay before daylight and running cross country

after school, and then back home for more chores, mostly giving oats and medicine to horses, and mucking stalls, and homework. I was beet red, I could tell. The more I tried to concentrate on the poem the more I felt the eyes on me and when I glanced up and snuck a look, they were. I could already feel the envy. Like a wind. By the end of the day I wasn’t sure if any of this was a curse or a blessing. Anyway, I went to see Sykes. I couldn’t eat anything in the cafeteria so I just went to the Girls’ Room and sat on the toilet and tried to breathe. He said, Cima I think you have a good chance for the Ritter Scholarship. He was completely bald. I thought his head was the shape of an egg. I remember seeing tiny beads of sweat on the mottled pink dome of it as if it were he on the hot seat. He was from Illinois, outside of Chicago, I remember. He said, You will write the personal essay in your application about ranch life and losing Bo. I was shocked. Almost as if I had hallucinated that last request. Well, it wasn’t a request.

Come again, I said. His hands were resting on the desk and he actually made a careful triangle out of his thumbs and forefingers and pursed his lips and looked into it as if it were some Masonic window into my destiny. He said, You will write about being a ranch girl and losing your brother who was your soulmate. I stared at him. I had heard that he controlled the whole application process. But nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. I mean put their big fat foot, clomp clomp, into my most interior landscape. Bo to me was like a secret garden. A place only I could go. A source of both grief and great strength. He was smiling at me. He had the smallest mouth and only one side came up. I remember.

The turmoil. Life had just opened up really wide and bright then suddenly the horror: that to go there I would be asked to forfeit my soul. Something like that. Terrifying. I know I was flushing to the roots and I couldn’t seem to articulate anything. He kept smiling at me. He said, You don’t have to thank anyone now, it’s certainly momentous. Deus ex machina. That’s what he said! As if he were God! My word. He thought I was overcome with gratitude and I was actually so furious. I felt violated. I was so mad I could’ve taken his egg head and crushed it. I just mumbled and ducked out.

Did you write about Bo?

Yes. I wrote about how my college counselor had demanded that I write about my dead twin. I wrote a long essay, twice as long as asked for, about a certain kind of tact that was part of ranch culture and why I thought it had developed and why it was important and how the fact that a ranch girl writing about her missing twin might appeal to the admissions people at the highest caliber Eastern college was another example of the disconnect between us. Eastern establishment and Western land based people. We didn’t want anybody’s sympathy.

I was so angry. Never been so mad I don’t think. I sent the application off without letting Sykes review it, which was strictly against protocol. Nobody had ever done it. He tried to scuttle the application, he was such a vengeful little fuck, but it was too late. I guess they were so impressed with my ranch girl grit or something. I got in, of course. Early decision, full ride.

The college pressured the high school and forced Sykes to retire. You know the part that still troubles me about all that is that I knew I would. Get accepted. I mean I flipped the emotional payoff they were looking for, didn’t I? I mean I was truly furious, but I also knew somewhere inside that it would make my candidacy even stronger. I have prayed about it often. I mean apologizing to Bo for using him to get into college.

I shook the dirt off some Swiss chard and lay it in the basket.

You didn’t use Bo. You wrote exactly what you were feeling.

Yeah, but I’ve often thought that the move with the most integrity would’ve been to blow off Dartmouth for having that kind of expectation, those values, and go to Northern State. I mean it’s an ag school. Was.

You were what? Seventeen? You wanted to flex your muscles. You were an ass kicker like your dad. Nobody on earth is more righteous than a seventeen year old.

And it wasn’t the college, it was Mr. Sucks. You know what I mean. He was right, after all. About the subject that would snare them. I don’t know. I think of him sometimes, a middle aged, single man, humiliated out of the one job he was great at. What he did with the rest of his life, how it was for him when the flu hit. Lonely, alone, terrified. Funny the things that keep you up at night after all that has happened.

Peter Heller, The Dog Stars (pp. 244-245).

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If you are not familiar with The Dog Stars, it is a highly lauded novel. I would recommend it for those who have a particular interest in a certain kind of fiction.

But before I go on, I want to do a thought experiment. If you had to guess what the plot of book The Dog Stars is what would you say? There are a few hints in the passage above, but I think many would be surprised that the book is what The New Yorker calls postapocalit. 

Virtually the entire book, aside from this passage, describes events that place in a dramatic present, 9 years after a pandemic flu has wiped off 99% of the people on the planet. The Hemingwayesque descriptions of how the few survivors fight their way through desperate strangers is far better than most apocalyptic fiction. The characters must fight for their lives, must forage for food, must overcome the loss of virtually all that we today take for granted. The focus is on the literal handful of characters who have survived and what they do each day to make it through another day. It is spare, raw, and moving.  (It is not as great as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but it is pretty darn good).

What is so odd, however, is that nestled in the novel, out of nowhere, there is this passage about how Cima wrote her college essays and how it helped to get her into Dartmouth. The passage sticks out-- not like a sore thumb --but rather as an uncanny and ghostly haunting by the current obsession we as a culture  have about kids getting in to the Ivies or other elite schools. There is nothing else like this passage in the rest of the book. Both the author and the editors, however, somehow thought this story about admission said something about Cima and her character. In addition, however, the actions on part of Cima and her counselor underscore just how important, in the world we live in now, the whole process of getting into schools has become and also just how ‘sick’ it is. Ethics and moral values on the part of Sykes, Cima and the schools too are tainted, diseased. The sickness that takes over the planet and kills almost everyone may be the planet’s way of responding to this moral sickness.

The passage serves as a sign that the whole application process is now somehow linked in a strange way with the future apocalypse depicted in this novel (and hundred of others novels, stories and TV shows).  Is this an example of hyperbole on my part? Let’s see.

This past Monday (August, 31, 2015), The Chronicle of Higher Education, the premiere publication for what goes on at colleges, published a series of articles about students and stress: What is the headline?

An Epidemic of Anguish 

 The stories underscore how miserable and sickly students attending college are these days. Statistics showing the vast increase in those seeking counseling become the proof that there is a sickness spreading through students and that something needs to be done; otherwise, the epidemic might spread and then …and then the end might just come. 

Other writers, mostly pundits or educators, use words that also invoke apocalyptic scenarios to describe what goes on at some of the best secondary schools and colleges in the world. These books are not fiction but they do call t mind the dark metaphors and scenarios of books like World War Z. Frank Bruni, in his book Where You Go Is Not Who You Will Be calls the process students go through to get into top colleges “madness”. William Deresiewicz, calls those students who attend places like Yale “Excellent Sheep” His thesis, to put it simply, is that the students are Zombies who drag themselves through classes in which all that matters is a grade in order to get jobs in consulting and finance: “They’ve learned to ‘be a student,’ not to use their minds”. William Deresiewicz,  Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. 

In effect, he says that these students are just like the Zombies we see all over the popular media. They have no brains to think; instead, they are merely bodies going through the motions of living but inside these bodies there is no soul, no emotion, nothing that would support a live worth living. . These are the zombies that populate the ivy leagues. Other books about the college process that have come out recently depict the college or the high school experience by employing war tropes and metaphors. People have to battle to get in; they have to fight for a spot. Then have to beat others and conquer tests, classes and the competition. They have to win. It is all out war out there for students and there are casualties everywhere. Kids are falling apart emotionally and are not prepared to work after they graduate. They have lost their childhood and they have lost their will. Parents have stepped in and taken their souls. For these writers, the whole education system at highly selective schools is falling apart and we need to change things before it is too late.

I wish I was exaggerating about the doomsday rhetoric. Sadly ,I am not. It seems that not a week goes by now without an article or book that declares the dire state of students who attend selective schools (and other schools too but the books are geared to scare those who have the means to care about the whole selective admission game). There are virtually no smiles, no one laughs, and it is eerily silent. The only voices we hear from are those who have suffered or those who have beaten the odds.  They are the heroes or casualties.  I guess I have somehow missed this dystopian transformation on college campuses . Maybe I am just blind, but I don't really think so. 

Almost every day I either venture out into the trenches that are college campuses or I talk individually with students in different schools all around the world. I really don’t see many zombies or bodies on the ground. I don’t feel a sense of deadness. I feel far more life and energy than I do in most other places I visit.

I talk with bright and motivated students--some are stressed about finding a job or getting into graduate school, but they are not falling apart and are not miserable. They don' appear sick or don't have an affect like a typical Zombie. In fact, their energy and life force is life renewing for me. They give me hope about the future. Or at least most of them are not. They are spending time with friends, they are going out at night and having fun and they are working hard to do well. They are active citizens on campus and are smart enough to develop soft skills and critical thinking skills too. This week alone I have talked with dozens of students and have spent time with many who are talking with each other about everything under the sun--like Facebook or politics or food or class tensions or great novels and poems. I think the apocalypse that is getting lots of press these days is far more fiction than it is an accurate portrayal of what is going on at most college campuses.

Am I saying there are not suffering students, some who in fact feel compelled to take desperate measures? No. I do know some of these students too, but these are more the outliers than the norm. The good news is that the ones I know who are suffering are getting help But apocalyptic scenarios grab our attention and that makes things seem worse than they really are for most students. Yes, there is more stress in finding a great job these days—welcome to the global economy. I do think more student seek help because schools have been much more proactive in encouraging students to seek help. The recruiting efforts, as it were, have worked. The good news, if it can be put this way, is that the ones I know who are suffering are getting help.  Students are not struggling with depression or anxiety alone. They do not see these illnesses as weaknesses --they way they were perceived by many a generation ago. The fact that more students are seeking help may say that they have been educated in ways those in the past were not.

There is another book that I want to highlight—Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and mark Johnson. They recognized,  a generation ago, the metaphors we use determine how we think.   Here is how the book is described on Amazon.com:

Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

The metaphors we use are, to some degree, the boundaries of our thought. We use metaphors all the time and it is also true that metaphors use us too. They expand or limit the way we see the world. In our current climate, in education and in much popular culture, sickness, disease, madness, war and the apocalypse are metaphors of choice. In choosing these metaphors, we see the world not as it “really “is but through a glass darkly, very darkly. I would argue that we need to think critically about using these metaphors to describe the lives of students. They are not sheep or zombies and the stress they feel is not an epidemic. These  metaphors persuade us to see education and students in an unhealthy way (literally and metaphorically). They may also get the students themselves to see the world they are as sick—they can persuade people that things are wrong and by doing so make them worse. What my own senses show me when I walk on campuses and when I talk to students is that most are walking or running or singing or painting or studying or volunteering  and learning or all of the above. They are full of life.

I do not want to end this particular entry as though it were a fairy tale in which everyone gets what they want-- happily ever after is misleading. But “the end is near” doomsday scenarios are too. If you do not believe me, I encourage people to go visit some campuses right now. The students are back, the weather is good, and there are football games and concerts and lots of great classes and lectures. There are students working and playing in virtually every way and there are lots of smiles, real ones. Listen to the laugher. Talk to the students. There are lots of people doing just what they should in college: learning and living and looking forward to contributing to a world that holds out promise and hope.