The most important thing in my Tufts office is not a book or a journal article. It's not the letter from the Dean congratulating me for winning a research fellowship. It's not the treacherously high pile of papers I still have to grade, the CDs that will get me through the task, or even one of the precious drawings by my five year old and ten year old that cover my walls. Rather, the most essential thing in my office is the humble box of Kleenex that I keep on the corner of my desk, ready to hand to my students.
I run through a box of 200 tissues every six weeks or so. Maurizia (like all the other names here, a pseudonym) used a good quarter-box last December, when her ongoing struggle with anorexia began to eclipse her capacity to finish the fall term. Caitlin used up her share over the course of a three-year crusade to convince her parents that she shouldn't go to law school. Helga, a student from a former Soviet republic, failed to hold back the tears when she came to tell me that her husband, a war journalist, had been unreachable for several weeks - and then again when a hospital worker called to say that he'd been seriously injured by a bomb. As always, the Kleenex was there.
The boys sometimes cry, too, though they of course have been trained in stoicism. Jose dropped in half a dozen times or more, each time to announce that he wasn't coming to my class because he no longer cared about anything at all and so was going to drop out of school and drift. Jose is still here. But Friedrich is not: Last September he suffered a psychotic episode so horrific that it's unclear whether he'll ever recover sufficiently enough to return. And then there's Anthony, who was so ashamed of how much help he needed from me during the fall that he could barely speak when I finally insisted that he check in with me in March.
For every Helga or Anthony there are five or six other students who are simply overwhelmed by the volatile combination of freedom and responsibility that comes with being a college student, especially these days. Some students - for example, those whose parents are intent on their going to a particular kind of professional school - find precious little freedom in the mix. For them, copping a C-minus in Organic Chemistry or a pre-law class feels like being diagnosed with a terminal disease; only worse, since life in fact will go on.
However, I've found that things are often even harder for those students whose destinies are left in their own hands. These students still feel the weight of their parents' hopes and dreams, especially in the wake of their Mom and Dad's respect and generosity. They still feel the burden of the sheer amount of money that is being forked over to pay for something which they can't quite imagine will add up to a genuine education.
I hardly know what to say to the anxious parent who calls - with increasing frequency, nowadays - wanting to know why his or her child should major in philosophy, the discipline in which I teach. My best answer is: because it interests and engages them. But of course, this fact is besides the point for any parent who would ask the question. And it would be horrid of me to add, although I'm often tempted to: your fear that he or she will not be able to convert a college education into a secure future is more than your child can bear.
I need to replenish my box of tissues more often each spring, as one graduating senior after the next files into my office paralyzed by the question, "What next?" I spend a good deal of time during these months helping students live with the answer, "Who knows?" The successful pre-med or public policy-bound student is often the envy of the majority of seniors, who have arrived at the brink of independent adulthood with little sense of how to survey, let alone conquer, their new terrain. But what these students tend not to realize is that their assumption about the 22-year-old pre-lawyer or pre-Psychology professor that has seemingly already staked out a claim on life, is flawed. Many of these apparently more settled students, I have found, simply have yet to arrive at a crossroads in deciding their fate.
Ordinarily, when the Kleenex is put into service in my office, it turns out that what is at the heart of a student's distress is a fear of disappointing his or her parents. When this happens, I sometimes tell my students about my own confusion upon graduating from college, a confusion that didn't really dissipate until well after I enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Philosophy at nearly 30 years old.
More often, I recall what my dissertation advisor said to me right before my first child was born: "Now you have to learn to look under the bed and pretend that you're sure that there are no monsters there." Our vision of what the world could do to our children is a kind of monster, one that we parents may be unable to exorcise on our own. So a good part of my job is helping my students figure out how to parent their parents: to acknowledge their parents' fear and then bring themselves to look under the bed and offer reassurance that there's nothing threatening there.
I watched Maurizia, the anorexic student, do this last fall, when she called her parents from my office phone, trying to gather strength by gripping my hand. "Daddy," she said. "I need to come home now. I'm sick. I can't get better by myself. I need you to help me and to love me just as I am, right now, no matter what happens." And then, having let herself be scared, she was calm. "Daddy," she said. "I love you. I know what I need to do. I'm going to be okay."
Nancy Bauer is an assistant professor of philosophy. She was awarded Professor of the Year this year by the Tufts Community Union Senate.
