Congratulations! You’ve made it into the school top-ranked for the comfort of its Tempurpedics and the luxury of Bear’s Den with its nine kinds of French toast. What are you gonna do with all that comfort?
No doubt, this is in part what drew you to the institution. I’ll say it right now, it was attractive for me to see I would be comfortable here, especially compared to the dorms I saw when touring the country’s top institutions. All of the schools I visited made some sort of claim as to the excellence of their facilities—of course they would, that’s the point when you’re looking at schools with the highest tuitions in the world. Wash U has excellent facilities when it comes to a lot of the scientific research we do, true. But we are increasingly well known for our ranking in the comforts that come along with your pursuit of a higher education here. Think about that.
What does it mean for your university to pride itself so greatly on the comfort it offers its students? The commercialization of higher education makes the student, and in most cases, the parent, a client, a customer, a consumer. Our top institutions are selling comfort in a way that could have only arisen when higher education became something to be taken for granted. The luxuries of the South 40 resemble a resort. Yes, college can be the time of your life, you’ll never be younger, YOLO kiddos. But there should be no time more challenging than college. Schools appealing to our desire for comfort are doing us a disservice in our approach to higher education. Our learning cannot afford to be maintaining the status quo that is the dividing line of those of us with degrees, and those of us without.
Find the list of classes in this guide, take at least 1, and let your world be shattered.
If you are a person of any kind of privilege: make yourself earn the comfort of that bed and that stir fry by unlearning racism, confronting your own misogyny (applies to all genders), disengaging from class hierarchies, and for god’s sake expand your horizons. This is not an appeal to an ideological college experience, this is a plea for incoming students at a prestigious institution to recognize the immenseness of their privilege and to be active in pursuing justice and a better world beyond the conventional measures.
And contemplate this: Would you have chosen Wash U without its ranking? And what has fueled our university’s climb to the top? What have we prioritized, and what have we decided wasn’t worth it? Who decides what would or wouldn’t sell to those who could afford it?
Let this guide provide some answers, but also open up more questions. Talk to the upperclassmen who have navigated this mask of a cushy world in challenging ways, and dig for some challenges yourself.