The university’s tour guides must be naturally anxious people. I don’t mean because they have to say a lot of memorized crap while walking backward and herding generationally diverse tourists. It’s the constant weight of the comparison, the struggle with the implied enemies of the Ivy League and peer institutions that strains those smiles. These poor guides carry the neurotic burden for an institution obsessed with measuring that never quite measures up. The Freudian anxieties of the tour guide become clear with the telling of the staple story of our mall-measuring contest: “The University of Virginia said its was the biggest, so we pulled out a ruler, and it turns out we have the longest mall in the country.”
This becomes relevant to me as a senior because a number of offices within the university bureaucracy want to know if I’m doing anything impressive post-graduation. Much of the university’s advertising is devoted to explaining that what may look like a third-rate job-placement machine is actually a second-rate job-placement machine. This is accomplished by drawing attention to those who “move up” after this school: the handful of university students sent to Harvard Law School, Morgan Stanley and the like. The selling point here isn’t that all graduates are on the path to fortune-making success — no one confuses our public institution with the top-tier placement machines — but this imagined lifestyle isn’t closed to someone who attends this university. In a country where everyone is going to win the lottery (or at least American Idol), a few examples that suggest any chance of success are enough. The university doesn’t have to answer for increased unemployment among young college graduates — if some graduates got good jobs, then it’s presumably your fault if you don’t. Then it sells visions of our successes to the next round of buyers and neglect to mention the rest.
I don’t blame prospective students and their families for falling for this line. The way the college market sets up the choice, plenty of high schoolers will be relieved that their chances at lives full of prestige and privilege aren’t shot at the age of 18. Sellers always want desperate buyers, and there’s no one more desperate than parents worried about their children’s futures. Instead of creating a community based on scholarship and exploration and then telling potential Terps about it, the university worries about its rankings, spending all day staring in the mirror like a model scared her thighs are getting fat. Same business school, half the price! Ivy gives us a rash! We’re exceptionally close to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration! We send students to all the best graduate schools!
There is nothing here about the university itself. References to students are really allusions to other, more prestigious institutions, and there is always the underlying contradiction between “We’re just as good as Stanford” and “You can still go to Stanford for graduate school!”
I don’t know if I’ll be doing something “impressive” after graduation, but I sure as hell won’t serve as a before-and-after shot for an institution that can’t stop bragging that Testudo has the biggest endowment of all the mascots in the ACC long enough to worry about the quality of undergraduate education. I think there are plenty of things at this university worth talking about, but none of them include how comparatively big our “mall” is.
Malcolm Harris is a senior English and government and politics major. He can be reached at harris at umdbk dot com.
