i am a cliché: an essay in two parts

Part 1: WWOOFing. "Man, we are such clichés!" proclaimed an e-mail I received from my friend Stella, who was a member of TeamParis and ¡TeamSevilla! She was referencing this New York Times article about "a new wave of liberal arts students who are heading to farms as interns this summer." She and I are both contemplating spending a few extra weeks in Europe after we leave Cambridge under a program called WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms), which enables volunteers to work on organic farms in exchange for free room and board. I currently have WWOOFing plans in the works for Scotland and France in July. I'm motivated less by disdain for industrial agriculture than by the opportunity to stay in Europe longer on a small budget, to practice my language skills and experience these countries outside of tourist hubs, and to live out my longstanding Tolstoy-influenced farmer fantasy. "If WWOOFing in America has 'as much bohemian cachet as backpacking through Europe,'" Stella observed, quoting the article, "then we must be getting cachet up the wazoo for doing it in Europe!"

That article alone would have been enough to make me feel like a cliché, but it came right on the heels of further evidence that farming is all the rage among the bohemian liberal arts crowd. Last week I had a phone date with my former executive director from Alaska. She had recently visited her alma mater, a liberal arts college in the Midwest, to deliver a talk to students in her capacity as a distinguished alum. I don't remember if she told me this in response to my plans or if she volunteered this information, but apparently tons of the students she met are planning on putting down their books and taking up their hoes this summer too. And this is at a college where, I am told, odors from a nearby turkey farm waft through campus with some regularity--not the ideal environment to inspire would-be farmers, I'd think.

Interestingly, both my former boss and the Times article point to a common culprit for this surge of agricultural enthusiasm among the youngsters: Michael Pollan. He wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma, which certainly ranks among my favorite books in recent memory. Pollan's philosophy on food includes eating more plants; avoiding processed stuff (or as he calls it, "edible foodlike substances") to the maximum extent possible; eating locally and seasonally as possible; and eating animals that lived in something approximating a natural environment, as opposed to a factory where they live in cages while being force-fed government-subsized corn. (It's not just what you eat that matters, Pollan says, but what "what you eat" ate.) Pollan's gift for storytelling and ability to weave together politics, ecology, and personal morality make him the kind of author who inspires disciples and not just readers. So maybe I am a cliché, but hopefully I am also part of a groundswell in a generation that will demand that we develop a more environmentally sane system with which to feed ourselves.

Part 2: Stuff White People Like. It has probably not escaped your notice that I am white, in the demographic sense of the term. But apparently I am really, really white in the cultural sense of the term, as described by that great arbiter of what constitutes urban, upper-middle-class white culture: stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.

You already know I am thinking of joining those corporate ag-hating liberal arts students on their unpaid stints on organic farms, but consider also that I am studying abroad for my graduate school education in a country with free health care and lots of opportunities for traveling. Prior to coming here, I worked as an advocate for low-income people at a non-profit organization in Alaska. In my free time I hung out with my gay friends, ordered movies from Netflix, watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, hosted dinner parties, tried learning Spanish, and spent time outdoors with my gear from REI and LL Bean. Also while in Alaska, I dated a half-Asian woman with a gifted, multilingual child; we watched Juno and attended an ugly sweater party together, and had a difficult breakup. Oh, and did I mention my love for coffee, local beers, wine, hummus and sushi?

If this has offended you, I apologize--but that would suggest that maybe you're a "white person" too.

proof i was in cameroon!

I'm happy to report that the photographic record of my trip to Cameroon wasn't completely lost in the mugging on that last night in Douala. As I mentioned, Kate didn't really take any pictures (with the exception of a couple post-mugging shots at our guesthouse), but Lisa, a Peace Corps volunteer and one of our Mt. Cameroon hiking companions, did get some group pictures during our trek. I shamelessly copied them from Facebook, so here you go: rare, long-lost photographic evidence of my time in Africa:


Me, Kate, Elyse, and Lisa, pre-climb in the town of Buea. Mt. Cameroon, half covered in clouds, is behind us.


Day 1, partway up, post-rainstorm. Buea is visible in the background, and on a clear day you could see Douala in the distance off the top-left corner of the picture. We did see the city lights from our first cabin.


The team at 4,095 meters! Kate had originally wanted to perform one of her signature cartweels to celebrate at the top, but the small space at the summit, preciptious drops on all sides, high winds, and stupefying lack of oxygen recommended otherwise.

here come the agnostics!

Anytime I walk into a bookstore, there are three sections that have a kind of gravitational pull on me: travel, politics, and religion. (Sorry, literature. Sorry, science.) The travel section is always a happy place, but I've found myself increasingly turned off by the shrill debates in the latter two sections. You can tell just from perusing the covers that the politics section consists mainly of two factions of people calling each other stupid--think of the Ann Coulters vs. the Al Frankens. In the religion section, outside of the study Bibles and scores of fluffy spiritual books, you have more of the same. On the one side we have the so-called "new atheists," headlined by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, and on the other side, we have a new cottage industry of pro-religion writers proclaiming the stupidity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. There's always been lots of money in God; now there's money in godlessness too.

Nowadays if people ask me about my religious stance, I usually describe myself as "culturally Catholic and metaphysically agnostic," meaning that I still identify with my Catholic upbringing but can't honestly sign onto belief in anything supernatural. Even in my uber-Catholic days, I think it was always the ethical dimension-- the social Gospel, Dorothy Day, St. Francis -- that kept me going. And let's be honest, the politicization of Christianity by the Republican Party has put a real bad taste in my mouth. And I'm the first person to point out that the fact that hypocritical politicians want to legislate sexual morality while approving government-administered torture has no bearing on whether God exists or Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead.

That said, I don't put much stock in the "new atheist" crowd either. The main complaint of Harris and Hitchens, at least, seems to be that religion makes people do awful things to each other: see 9/11, the Inquisition, etc. But I think if human beings had evolved to be irreligious instead of religious, we would still be killing and be doing bad things to each other. We would just find non-religious justifications for doing so. (When I made this point to my brother, he directed me to this awesome South Park segment. Other than some blood & guts there's nothing too offensive...unless you happen to be an atheist who takes him/herself far too seriously.) The real problem, I think, is the human lust for power, property, and control; religion has just served as the most convenient justifying idiom for most of history.

So when I wandered into the Cambridge Borders recently, I was amazed to find a third strand emerging in the debate: the agnostics are in on this book-writing thing too! Books such as In God We Doubt and After Atheism are offering up a fascinating propsect: agnosticism as a defensible position, rather than a refuge for those wishy-washy folks who won't commit one way or the other. I've often felt like religious and irreligious folks alike treat me as if where I am now is just some kind of "phase" or transitional state, and before too long I'm going to come down on one side (theirs, naturally) over the other.

But what if agnosticism can be a home, and not just a hotel room? In this column Mark Vernon, the author of After Atheism, proposes that one can be a "principled agnostic." He makes the distinction between (i) "whatever" agnostics, who don't really care for the debate; (ii)atheistically-inclined agnostics, who tend toward nonbelief but think we can't know for sure that God doesn't exist; and (iii) religiously-inclined agnostics, who don't believe that settling the God question is within our capabilities but see something of value in religiosity. Vernon thinks that "principled agnosticism" makes the most sense for those in camp (iii); personally, I tend to waver between (ii) and (iii). Unlike Vernon, I don't think religion deserves credit for Bach or benevolence any more than it deserves blame for terrorism and war.

I doubt that the "principled agnostics" are going to win lots of converts. But perhaps they can rescue us from this inane debate between the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens camp and their critics? Science only knows.

how they learn us at cambridge

Way back in early October, 54 bright-eyed Development Studies grad students packed into a seminar room to meet and mingle with our new professors and classmates. I don't remember much of what the profs said during their remarks, but I do distinctly remember an acerbic lecturer warning us not to expect any "spoon-feeding." I doubt anyone was expecting to be spoon-fed, and his comment might put a harsher spin on the teaching system here than it deserves. However, I've come to realize that the spirit of his remark runs through many of the things that make Cambridge different from my experience of higher education in the U.S. It would be an exaggeration to say there's a "sink or swim" mentality, and the atmosphere is collegial, but it's true that you're on your own here to a much larger extent than I've seen back on my side of the pond.

Back-loading. There's tons of variation among courses--as I will discuss later--but in most cases it's possible to go an alarmingly long time in Cambridge without doing any work. Most of the Development Studies classes here are year-long, and I didn't submit a single thing that counted for a grade until January. One of my classes is evaluated solely by means of a 3-hour exam later this month. (No pressure or anything!)

The philosophy seems to be that as a student, you're responsible for disciplining yourself to work even when deadlines are very distant. This has suited me just fine, as I can generally keep my procrastination under control, but for the undisciplined it poses major problems. Largely gone are concepts like midterms or problem sets, which provide incentives to study consistently and, if needed, a signal that one needs to ratchet things up before it's too late. We do have unassessed essays for some classes, with "supervisions" conducted by PhD students, but these do not necessarily resemble the work on which we'll later be evaluated. During a recent round of gathering student opinions in my capacity as student rep, the lack of feedback was the new #1 complaint, especially among non-native English speakers. To be fair, though, I'm not sure how much of this is a function of Cambridge vs. the U.S. and how much is a function of grad school vs. undergrad.

Resources. One of the starkest differences between small, uber-friendly Williams and big, impersonal Cambridge is the availability and ease of access of academic resources. It takes a certain amount of forethought, savvy, and competitive instinct to get the books you need here. At Williams I remember getting reading lists for my classes, buying the appropriate books at the bookstore, and receiving chapter- or article-length readings bundled together in course packets. Nobody seems to buy their books here--it would break the bank if I tried--and we don't get those handily photocopied course packets. You get the reading list, which often contains more readings than any human being could possibly digest in a year, and then it's you and the library.

Or should I say, libraries. This year I have used the Mill Lane library (Development Studies and a few related fields are housed there), my college library, my friends' college libraries (thanks guys!), the economics library, the geography library, the law library, and (cue dread-inspiring music) the University Library. The absurd monstrosity-- or is it a monstrous absurdity?-- that is the UL probably deserves an entry of its own sometime, so I won't get into detail now, but let's just say that any day in which I learn that a needed book is only at the UL and can only be used in the UL reading room is a sad, sad day.

I should probably mention at this point that there is little to no communication between the professors assigning the readings and the librarians selecting, buying, and stocking the books. The Mill Lane Library by now has many copies of the most sought-after Development Studies books, and usually one copy is not allowed to be checked out, so if you come after the stampede you're not completely screwed. Cambridge is huge enough that the risk of a book on a reading list being completely unavailable are practically nil. But you might have to bike across town to an obscure departmental library, or get your bud to check it out from his college.

Of course, there are mitigating factors and coping strategies. Nobody does all the reading, and for essay-based classes you can do well by intensively reading on your essay topics and getting a glancing familiarity with the other pockets of literature. For exam-based classes, any sane person gets in a reading group to benefit from some division of labor.

Anonymity, Accountability, and Feedback. My experience in the U.S. was that professors generally know the identity of the students whose essays and exams they were grading, and professors have a huge amount of discretion in assigning grades. The system could hardly be more different here. We submit all of our work anonymously, marked only with an individual student number; each exam or paper is graded (or "marked" as they say) by the instructor and a second "reader" whose identity we never know. All marking happens at the end of the year, so in many cases several months elapse between submission deadlines and marking. Somewhat irritatingly, we don't even get marks on individual exams or essays--students receive only an average mark for each class. And to top all of that off, all of the exam and essay questions, student responses, and marks for the entire year get shipped off to be scrutinized by an "external examiner" at a peer institution, such as a Development Studies program at Oxford or Sussex.

I can see the merits of this system: more objective evaluation of student work, greater uniformity of standards, external accountability for the department. Because this system severs the link between the professor-student relationship and grading, I imagine there's less grade inflation here, though I've never really been persuaded that grade inflation is such a big problem. Yet I think there's probably too little mercy mixed in with the justice. Sometimes a professor might have knowledge of mitigating circumstances, and I don't know that the occasional bit of accommodation for that is always a bad thing. The system also seems to suffer from a gaping lack of transparency--which is a troubling hallmark of this university at every level.

Variation among courses. There are huge differences in work routine and lifestyle between PhD students (who often have something that approximates a 9-to-5 job) and MPhil students such as yours truly. There is also tremendous variation between MPhil courses. Some require dissertations; some don't. Some treat the dissertation like a year-long class; others block off a few months at the end just for dissertation writing. Some are wrapped up by June; others go to September. Some have year-long classes; others have different modules each term.

The upshot is that there is much less of a shared academic experience across different programs. There have been times when I've been crazed with deadlines and some of my friends have been sitting pretty, and vice versa. On balance, I think this kind of variation is probably a good thing--let a thousand flowers bloom. I do think it militates against a broader community spirit, though. It's one of the reasons why Cambridge occasionally makes me think of the way some of my friends who have lived there describe New York City: vibrant and active, with limitless social activities, but with a strong undertow of isolation.

I don't know how all of this sounds to outsiders, and I'm sure a lot of what I've described seems crazy. Now that I've been here for a while, I realize more and more that in a multilayered, complicated and crusty place like Cambridge, there is often a strange rationality to the absurdity. If you bang your head against the wall enough, you can reach a point of acceptance and even appreciation for the odd ways of Cambridge.

life, smørrebrød, and the pursuit of happiness in denmark

Some pictures and musings from my time in Denmark with my good Gates friend Talia. It was likely my last weekend jaunt to a new country, sad to say, as I reach the limits of Papa Gates' munificence.


Danish Patriotism. From my limited pre-trip reading about Denmark, I learned about the Danes' remarkable levels of patriotism, marked above all by gratuitous flag-waving. The Danes did not disappoint. As we exited customs and immigration at the Copenhagen airport, there was a throng of people awaiting their friends and relatives, about half of them with Denmark's red and white banner in hand. In one of Copenhagen's spacious city parks, we spotted a group of young adults lounging with an evenly spaced phalanx of Danish flags around their picnic blankets. City buses and street vendors, like the one pictured above, also show their national spirit. (By the way, just to the left of the bushes in the picture you can see Denmark's most undeservedly famous landmark, the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor.)

I tried to figure out what accounts for the Danes' patriotic streak, and I wonder if it has something to do with the country's small size and its tendency to be thrashed around by the broader currents of European history. One of many fascinating episodes was an early and short-lived experiment with Enlightenment-style political liberties, led by King Christian VII's personal physician, who made himself de facto ruler as his boss descended into schizophrenia. During World War II, Denmark folded relatively quickly in the face of a Nazi invasion, but the resistence movement did manage to smuggle 90% of Danish Jews into Sweden. Today the country continues trying to find its voice among the much bigger players of the European Union.



Minor Obsessions. Talia's petty obsession for the weekend was sandwiches (more on those later); mine was spotting Sweden. Copenhagen is at the far eastern end of Denmark, separated from the Swedish city of Malmö by a narrow channel. We got a good long look at Malmö from the air during an aborted landing, a go-around and a successful landing, but I wanted to see it from the ground. This isn't as easy as that map might suggest, but I did spot Sweden from a train station and then from the clock tower of Copenhagen's city hall, pictured above. Sweden now joins Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Jordan among the ranks of countries I haven't actually visited, but have looked into while standing in another country.



Damn Hippies! During our meandering walking tour of Copenhagen, we happened on a ragtag protest proceeding through the streets. Most of the protestors were disaffected-looking young men, and they paraded behind a tractor rigged up with a stage and a sound system. It didn't take us long for us to figure out what they were after–legalization of marijuana–and where they were going–the same place we were headed, the bizarre social experiment known as Christiania.

In 1971, a previous generation of disaffected young adults broke into an abandoned army barracks in Copenhagen and declared it to be the "free state" of Christiania. Politically and culturally, the founders of Christiania were pretty similar to the hippie counterculture in the United States. Christiania continues to exist in a strange quasi-legal limbo: its residents pay no taxes and have created their own currency, but Christiania's streets are regularly patrolled by police, mostly to crack down on drugs. Mainstream Danish attitudes seem to vary from mild resentment to amused acceptance, but it's clear that despite calls to "normalize" Christiania, no government has yet found it to be in its political interest to forcibly dismantle it. Talia and I spent a little bit of time walking around and checking out Christiania's small shops and street art (taking pictures inside is forbidden).

My visceral reaction to Christiania was very negative, and its intensity surprised me. On paper, my politics probably look a lot like those of a Christianian: I'm all for decriminalizing pot (though I won't touch it myself), I'm for peace and environmental protection and all that hippie stuff. Resentment of authority is part of my makeup. However, I found the smug self-righteousness of Christiania to be too much. It made me reflect on what I would have been like if I'd grown up in the '60s. I suspect that I would have hated Nixon and the war, and idolized MLK and RFK, but there's no chance that I would have been a flower child. I also wonder if this is part of what turned me on to Obama- in some ways I see the same combination of liberal politics and conservative temperament in myself that I see in him.



So why are they so happy? I can't say that I discovered the secret to the Danes' remarkable levels of happiness, but I did collect some clues. The pastries can't hurt, and neither can smørrebrød, the popular open-faced sandwich composed of a slice of rye bread and all manner of delicious toppings. (Above, I prepare to chow down on three smørrebrød with curried herring, shrimp and eggs, and bacon with a liver-mushroom paste. The Danes may be known for being happy, but they're not particularly famous for being healthy; Lonely Planet goes so far as to say they "make the Scots look like Jane Fonda!")

On a more serious note, Talia and I both observed a quality of Danish life that is rare in cities of Copenhagen's size: trust. Even in Denmark's largest city, people regularly leave bikes unattended and unlocked. Most restaurants offer outdoor dining, but since it's still a little chilly at this time of year, they also provide all patrons with blankets, as you can see in the picture above. Running off with a blanket or two would be child's play, but there's no indication that anyone does. There is a downside to this kind of social cohesion–consider the Danes' reputation for xenophobia–but I was struck by the realization that, if I lived in Copenhagen, I don't think I would have a whole lot to worry about.