Megan had enrolled in this seminar because the catalog description had piqued her curiosity: “Is life inherently worthwhile, or only if the life lived is a good life? Is death necessarily negative? Is a life not lived superior to a life lived in vain?”
Megan was no philosophy major—she would declare biology next year, and her curriculum was designed specifically for premed. But that course description had grabbed her attention. She figured that it could only serve the medical profession well if a future doctor took the time to contemplate the larger meaning of life and death in addition to learning the science that could extend one and forestall the other.
She should have foreseen, though, that a philosophy seminar with no prerequisites would devolve into a series of free-floating chat sessions during which unfocused undergrads—the ones who would eventually wind up behind a Starbucks counter, or perhaps in law school—attempted to show off their mastery of the most reductionist versions of the various branches of philosophy.
Today’s class, as was often the case, had held momentary promise when Dr. Stein posed the question that was still staring at Megan from the screen of her laptop: “Are all lives equally good?”
Unfortunately, the first student to respond immediately played the Hitler card. As in, “Of course not. I mean, who here mourns the death of Hitler?” After just three weeks of a single philosophy course, Megan was convinced that the quality of the national civic dialogue would be noticeably improved by a voluntary prohibition against all analogies to Nazi Germany.
Poor Dr. Stein had done her best to steer the conversation on track, but then the girl who always wore overalls and patchouli oil had set off another frenzy of mental masturbation by wondering aloud whether the mentally disabled enjoyed their lives as much as “regular” people.
Megan found herself contemplating her fingers jiggling on the keyboard again. Not her fingers as much as the keyboard itself. The layout. She understood why the Q and the Z belonged to the whim of her left pinky; Hitler analogies were more common than the use of those letters. But what criteria had been used to determine the keys that would qualify for “home base,” as her mother had called it during her early touch-typing training? A, S, D, L—those she understood. But F and J? And the semicolon? How often did anyone use semicolons?
She forced herself to tune back into the conversation around the seminar table. She gathered that the patchouli girl’s comment about the mentally disabled had set off a larger conversation about the value of knowledge when a guy with a paperboy hat and a beatnik soul patch retorted, “Please, go read more Ayn Rand. You’re asked about lives without value, and you pick on the retarded? Of much more questionable value is a life spent absorbing knowledge but then doing absolutely nothing with it.”
At that, Megan thought she noticed a twitch in Dr. Stein’s left eye. Twenty minutes later, the class was still debating whether knowledge was worthy for its own sake, or merely as a means toward practical ends.
“But even to differentiate between knowledge for its own sake and for its pragmatic import is a fiction,” the patchouli woman insisted. “It assumes an objective reality that stands alone, independent of our own cognitive responses to it. We have no measure of reality other than through our own thoughts, so what precisely do you mean when you say ‘knowledge standing alone’? Knowledge is reality.”
“Only if you’re an epistemological idealist,” the soul patch argued. “Maybe Kant would agree with that kind of logic, or even John Locke. But a realist would maintain that there is an ontological reality that is independent of our own experiences. And if we can set aside our narcissism for thirty seconds and accept that premise, then it’s not a lot to ask of the privileged elite that they use their knowledge to make a concrete, objective difference in that reality.”
“This might be slightly off topic—”
Megan felt her eyes rolling involuntarily away from the speaker, the decent-looking guy who always wore concert T-shirts.
“This might be slightly off topic, but has anyone else wondered why John Locke on Lost is named John Locke? It explains the inconsistencies in the various narratives. The writers are telling us to take all those flashbacks and flash-forwards with a grain of salt; they are each filtered through the lens of the characters’ personal experiences.”
“Oh, my God. Did he really just say that?” The whisper came from the student sitting next to Megan, a guy in a Philadelphia Flyers jersey with a serious case of bed head. “I should have saved my trust fund and gone to Penn.”
“Okay, people, time out.” Stein rapped her knuckles against the tabletop to call the class to order. “Let’s get back to the original question.”
Megan wished she had a dollar for every time Dr. Stein had taken them “back to the original question.” The woman no doubt knew her shit, but she had to stop treating these morons as intellectual equals. If this group could be trusted with the amount of guidance provided by the original question, they wouldn’t be talking about Hitler, the mentally disabled, and a television show about island castaways.
She finally caved to temptation and opened Internet Explorer on her laptop. Almost all of the university’s buildings were equipped with wireless Internet access, but a serious professor like Dr. Stein certainly expected her students to refrain from partaking during class time. Barely veiled surfing ran rampant, however, and to Megan it was no surprise. The university’s current regime was, in her view, no different from cutting lines of cocaine on the desktop in front of addicts and telling them not to snort.
She moved her right hand onto the laptop’s mouse pad and checked her Gmail account while making a point of periodically looking up from her screen to deliver a pensive nod. From there, it was on to Perez Hilton’s site for the celebrity gossip. Then to Facebook, where it was her turn in the Scrabble game she was playing with Courtney. She knew that at some point Courtney’s decision not to attend NYU would cut back on their socializing, but for now they remained in daily online contact.
Megan noticed that her neighbor with the bed head was eyeballing her computer screen. She was about to deliver her best warning glare when he nudged his notebook an inch in her direction.
Beneath a series of doodled boxes and circles, he had jotted, “You missed HAYSEED for a bingo.”
She turned to her game and confirmed the mistake. Switching the laptop back to her blank class notes, she typed a sad face—a colon, followed by a dash and a left parenthesis.
Her neighbor scribbled another note: “campusjuice.com.”
Megan clicked back to her browser, typed the Web site name into the address bar, and gently hit the enter key. “Campus Juice.” White bubble letters against an orange background, followed by a slogan that said it alclass="underline" “All the Juice, Always Anonymous.”
In the middle of the screen was a text box, labeled “Choose Your Campus.”
Megan typed in NYU and hit enter. Up came a message board consisting of a list of posts, each with its own subject title.
Craziest Person in Your Dorm
WTF?!: Did Brandon Saltzburg drop out?
Freshman Fifteen (Plus Another Fifteen)
Who’s Sluttier: Kelly Gotleib or Jenny Huntsman?
Hottest profs.
I’ve got a sex tape
Michael Stuart gave me the clap
Megan dropped her right hand beneath the seminar table and flashed a thumbs-up at her neighbor, who doodled an exclamation point in the margin of his notebook.