Much decrying of the state of our school has recently appeared in The Herald. This includes complaints about decreasing student involvement in the shaping of Brown's future, the inhumanities and pre-professionalism of "Brown, Inc." and the philosophic deterioration of the New Curriculum. The status quo at Brown, reflected on by the denunciatory arguments of these opinions columnists is the result of a shift in recent years to value personal and institutional visibility over all else.
This shift is not unique to Brown. Indeed, we have either paralleled or followed the lead of society. In his 2009 article "The End of Solitude," former Yale Professor of English William Deresiewicz argues that our age is one obsessed with visibility. Deresiewicz adds to a series of general labels begun by Lionel Trilling in the 1950s, stating that if "the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility."
I use the term "visibility" in the same sense that Deresiewicz uses it, meaning life lived exclusively in relation to others. The rise of the visible has abolished the virtue of solitude. The worship of visibility proposes popularity as the highest goal.
At Brown, symptoms of visibility are rampant: the numbers of high school seniors who apply, celebrity professors and students, the new graduate programs and even our news-feed website. Gordon Gee, the most wildly visible of University presidents, played his short role. President Ruth Simmons will soon finish a tenure that has expanded the graduate school, begun a path toward offering online degrees, stressed faculty research over teaching and made a climb in the U.S. News rankings explicit and crucial.
If our society fixates on personal visibility and the viewing of others — from Facebook to Twitter to celebrity veneration — Brown is no exception. What, if anything, has thereby been neglected is less clear. But a sense remains for many that something has been forgotten or undercut.
As The Herald recently cited, former President Henry Wriston wrote in 1948 that Brown's "central business remains the increase of knowledge, the inculcation of wisdom, the refinement of emotional responses and the development of spiritual awareness." That article ("Is the University suffering an identity crisis?" Nov. 29) contrasts this vision to the contemporary Brown. This change was and is caused by the cultivation of visibility over more traditional roles of the college and University.
Is this all so bad? Doesn't increased visibility and worldly clout add to the value of a Brown degree? It may very well do so in our modern world and perhaps has always done so. It is certain that the weight that Brown places on the utility of visibility has never been greater than today.
The student body isn't immune to this postmodern phenomenon of visibility either. In an opinions column, Reuben Henriques '12 ("A university-college, if you can keep it," Nov. 7) notes that 55 students applied to be on the presidential selection committee and for the right to put it on their resume, while only 15 attended an open forum on the same topic. Students tacitly embrace grade inflation. Attending Brown in the first place is an exercise in visibility rather than learning for some proportion of students, and it seems that the student body and alums are content so long as that same visibility is constantly enhanced.
What about the sincerity of the romantics and the authenticity of the modernists, so obviously venerated by Wriston? Brown's administration has embraced visibility as its tenet, as have many of its students.
Is this column a push to return to some authentic age, one that never actually existed? No. Rather, it is an attempt to point out the core tenet of contemporary Brown, one ascendant in the last few decades. Recent history bends toward visibility.
Gregory Conyers '13 is an English concentrator from Oregon. He can be reached at gregory_conyers@brown.edu.
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