It seems that I’ve fielded a lot of complaints, as of late, about the lack of engagement among students at Wash. U. There are those among us who believe that college should be a consistently intellectual avenue of life exploration, a place where our brains are never turned off. I’ve heard complaints from people who say that students here, if anything, are too modest—that not hearing about someone’s research project or super-cool internship immediately upon making their acquaintance is a shame, or that we could all learn from one another a lot more than we actually do. I consider myself to be fairly engaged, and usually I hear these complaints as an expectantly sympathetic ear.

I’m going to take a stand and disagree. As a matter of fact, I’m immensely thankful that I go to a school where I don’t need a thorough knowledge of Western philosophy to have a conversation. I cannot count the number of times I have walked out of my Chief English Writers class and thanked my deity of choice that I don’t have to keep talking about Hamlet’s madness after leaving or have left an Assembly Series lecture from an eminent political figure thankful for the fact that my friends are talking about food or sex or gossip and not politics.

As obvious as this point may seem, I think that there is something to be said for possessing an acute knowledge of the culture that we, ourselves, inhabit—a culture in which we work and play, exist and question, talk and eat and gossip. I believe that we miss something when our brains are caught up entirely in literature or philosophy. I think that we can appreciate Aristotle more when we know our own cultural landscape well enough to see where he fits in, that we can better appreciate Mozart when we can compare his music and the cultural landscape that appreciated it to today’s music and our own cultural landscape.

Though an appreciation of our own culture cultivates a presentist perspective that is objectionable in many academic disciplines (classics, for example, or medieval English literature), I think that we fail to grasp the point of studying the humanities—or any discipline—unless we maintain their relevance to our own lives. It is because of this that I would like to leave the teaching up to professors, and it is because of this that I often want to make an excuse and walk away briskly when I hear someone next to me strike up a conversation about issues of agency in “Paradise Lost.” I want to leave a class understanding the way someone else understood the world and devote my time outside of class to understanding my own.

Of course, that’s not to say that I don’t appreciate the occasional casual literary reference, and it’s not to say that I genuinely love every moment in which I am given the opportunity to turn my brain off. But as students at an elite university, we spend a requisite amount of time with our brains on, just by merit of our coursework. Our being here is a testament to our capacity to engage, and from what I’ve observed, we succeed in engaging almost every day. It thrills me that most students here don’t constantly feel the need to compete intellectually outside of class and that the student body is, despite being overachieving, sort of “chill.”

With that in mind, I’d like to say that the normative goal of a concert in which we are expected to “walk in, lay down” is well taken and that we should absorb today’s opportunity to turn our brains off—sometimes, activities such as dancing and giggling are, in themselves, worthwhile efforts.