Brown is frequently mocked as a haven for overgrown babies. Our mascot is a teddy bear. We have ice cream socials, spaghetti food fight parties and as few academic rules as we can justify. Is Brown a four-year summer camp? If so, then most U.S. colleges are.
And it's only when I try to define my college-aged peers and myself, and come up with no better term for us than the vague and nondescript "young people," that I realize how bizarre this phenomenon of college is.
All of us here, first-years to seniors, are legal adults. Technically, we should be working jobs, paying taxes and growing gray hairs. But we're still in school, carrying Five Star notebooks, highlighters and backpacks; eating ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner; and in large part, riding along on our parents' paychecks.
In many ways, the lifestyle of a modern college student is juvenile by nature. These days, college is a place to discover who you are, and self-discovery is a crucial part of growing up. One looks forward to self-knowledge as the result of that process - when we become adults, we assume, we'll know who we are and what we want and can turn our attention to achieving those goals.
Growing up viewing our latter teens and early 20s as just another part of our school life, many of us did not expect to be members of the "real world" at this age. While college may be a natural venue for development, this ideal of a 20-year-old child, the assumption that at 20, the average person should not know what they want to achieve, is new.
Conversations with my parents and their friends have revealed to me the degree to which we take the free space to think afforded to us in our 20s for granted. For our parents' generation, 18 years old was adulthood in a real sense. Though a fair number went to college, plenty of their peers were living independent working lives. Those who became philosophical college students were written off by mainstream U.S. culture as directionless hippies and were aware of themselves as members of a privileged minority rather than the cultural norm. They assumed that by age 20 they ought to have some sense of their goals. Fundamentally, this generation identified themselves as belonging to a grown-up age bracket.
So what changed? When did college, as an experience and an age marker, become a de facto extension of childhood?
For starters, there's the increasing volume of American college students. While not everyone grows up expecting a college degree, a college education is a more integrated part of the U.S. cultural ideal than it was a generation ago and child-like collegiate culture is a more dominant factor in the identity of U.S. 20-somethings.
Then again, the shift may depend on demographics - people live longer now. And if the ominous Social Security breakdown we hear about daily is even close to true, they'll be working longer, too. With working life extended into the 70s and beyond, adulthood naturally begins slightly later and childhood expands to fill in the gap. When you expect to live to 100, 20 is still young - adult responsibility feels miles away.
But should it? When Ralph Nader addressed Brown students last fall, he claimed that we, Generation Y, are wasting our most productive years, our 20s, by trying to stay young. Staying in school for multiple degrees and getting married late, we are extending childhood, with all its aimlessness, well into our 30s.
Though Nader identified correctly our tendency to stay youthful at the expense of self-sufficiency and direction, this trend can be as empowering as it is dangerous. We are not a group that lacks ambition: we've got 30-something billionaires for role models. Unlike our parents, we live in an age when we can reach our goals with unprecedented speed and have the gift of time to spend developing those goals and our creativity. So long as we retain the motivation for mature accomplishments, our extended childhood can make us simultaneously innovative and wise.
Older generations may look on us "young people" as Peter Pan-esque Lost Boys, but I prefer to think we're Toys "R" Us kids. There are a million toys to play with right here and now, a million things to accomplish while we're still young and a million more ways to accomplish them with the energy of youth.
So no, I don't want to grow up anytime soon, but make no mistake, my summer at Camp Brunonia will be no retreat from reality.
Maha Atal '08 is a spunky old soul.
