Merriam-Webster's second definition of the word proposition is "an expression in language or signs of something that can be believed, doubted, or denied or is either true or false." I offer here four propositions that have proceeded from long personal observation of campus life--in the U. S. and in England--and from all-but-endless discussions with Duke undergraduates.
College is about books.
And by the word books, the proposition means this: College is about the best available tools--books, computers, lab equipment--for broadening your mastery of one or more important subjects that will go on deepening your understanding of the world, yourself and the people around you.
This will almost certainly be the last time in your life when other people bear the expense of awarding you four years of financially unburdened time. If you use the years primarily for mastering the skills of social life--as though those skills shouldn't already have been acquired by the end of middle school--or if you use these years for testing the degree to which your vulnerable brain and body can bear the strains of the alcoholism with which a number of Duke students depart campus, or the sexual excess that can seem so rewarding (to name only two of the lurking maelstroms), then you may ultimately leave this vast table of nutriment as one more prematurely burnt-out case.
Barring a possible marital partner, your teachers will prove to be the most important human beings with whom you come into contact at Duke.
If you don't make the fullest possible use of their resources--and a majority of them are available for far more use than most Duke students ever think of making--you'll have lost your last chance at any such opportunity. And in pure self-interest, you may find yourself requesting recommendations to graduate school from a few teachers. If you haven't bothered to get to know those teachers, other than in the classroom, they'll either decline your request or write very superficial evaluations of you in those recommendations.
If your college years prove to be "the best years of your life," your subsequent life will surely have been a gloomy failure for you and possibly a disaster for your future family.
My own life, and the lives of most of the friends and colleagues whom I've observed closely have grown increasingly rewarding--intellectually and emotionally--with each passing decade. I thoroughly enjoyed my own undergraduate years at Duke and my graduate years at Oxford. But I'm 70 now, and my mature adult life has always been far more interesting, pleasurable and rewarding than anything in my happy childhood and youth. If I can retain a big share of my memory, my awareness and a genuine concern for others, I'll hope to live to at least age 100--my present life goes on being that good.
Work hard, play hard, though often proclaimed as an advisable Duke-student guideline, is a miserable banner under which to pursue the next four years.
The misery is likely to reside in the second half of the statement. Playing hard--in any venue but a gymnasium, a sports ground, or other place devoted to physical exercise--has come to be defined here, as so often elsewhere, as indulging to the point of stupefaction in whatever brain-altering or brain-damaging substance is available. Few long-term witnesses of local student life, however, could name a single student who has worked too hard, though many thousands of students have played themselves into forms of self-destruction that ruined the remainder of their lives and tragically influenced their families and friends.
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