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The body has a relentless urge towards equilibrium: alignment, synthesis, neutralization, diffusion, atoms swimming and colliding, macrostructures heaving and disassembling, long tubules held taut like power lines; and it is wonderful, purposeful, directional, in theory. Tonight, the body desperately metabolizes and compromises until it is past three in Duffield and it has begun to feel delirious.
The rain has trapped some people inside. Most of them engineering and computer science and some of them pre-meds. And possibly some others, anonymous. There is only so much time to starve and ricochet until all the Celsii in the building are drained and eyes are shuttering. And there is more to be done before morning (which is drawing so frighteningly close!). So,
lawlessness descends. Ardent theft of the vending machines, abandonment of social decorum. Loud music, snoring, snack bartering, charger swiping. There is the indignity of sweatpants and candy bars and disequilibrium. The body has to accept and incorporate these late tired nights. Static electricity, muscle tension.
Cornell, the youngest Ivy, spins on an axis between the intimacy of the liberal arts and the hustle of land-grant style, industrialized STEM education. Twelve hours ago I was sitting in Zeus with friends from the humanities; and we drank chai lattes and they wore collared shirts and cardigans and commanded some of the intellect and dignity that flourishes under the sunlight of the Klarman atrium. Duffield is, correspondingly, the underworld that houses the vast mass of Cornell undergraduate engineering. THIS IS WHAT A CORNELL ENGINEER LOOKS LIKE, and it is a pale 19-year-old hunched over asleep in the big chairs on the west side of Duffield.
It is nice to be able to access spaces like Zeus. It is nice to have an art museum on campus, to have big old buildings like McGraw Hall to disrupt the sleek uniformity of the south Central neighborhood. It is nice to hear “Evening Song” on the belltower every day. But these artifacts of art and culture are superfluous to the experience of a typical Cornell student, who is probably in CS or biology or engineering or an ag science; and who will probably be swallowed up into a 900-person weed out class that will make them seriously reconsider their life plans before the end of their first semester. The intimacy of the liberal arts education is lost to a relentless grind.
In Ithaca, New York, we are dressing up our own intellectual tradition in sweats and energy drinks. We joke that Cornell is the easiest Ivy to get into and the hardest to graduate from, which is a decent (but not entirely truthful) heuristic to describe the academic burden imposed upon undergraduates, superimposed on an ill-weathered town in middle-of-nowhere, New York. When he was asked about his time at Cornell, Bill Maher once admitted that “I got an excellent education, and that was all I got from it. No fun.” He’d add, “I would have loved to have enjoyed my life. I just went to Cornell.” (Paradoxically, he studied English and history.)
Cornell’s most popular major, computer science, prepares students for entry to an increasingly bleak job market. I spoke recently to a ‘25 CS alumnus who told me that they felt lucky to have a full-time position at a coffee shop. How can you reconcile these long, laborious nights with the uncertain future that lies ahead? Bowers-CIS is taking more from its students than it can give. Computer science undergraduates roam career fairs like senseless nomads, press forwards blindly towards a career that is becoming extinct in its current form.
Their peers in engineering face a different dilemma. Boeing was heckled at a career fair last year by protestors of the war in Gaza; Cornell Engineering is haunted by the specter of weapons manufacturing. Banal problem-sets are contextualized by Lockheed Martin, the military-industrial complex, and bombs that fall like rain on places very far away from Upstate New York. In my freshman year, I met a student who told me that she wanted to develop chemical weapons for the U.S. government. The vast majority of engineering students do not dream of missile strikes, but weapons manufacturing is, regardless, a visible and formidable player in Cornell Engineering. Furthermore…
“The worst human being ever was a Cornell engineer.”
There is a pause in the conversation that I am currently overhearing. I am seated in the center of Zeus.
“No, I’m serious. Have you been to the fucking Eng Quad? Because…”
I am inclined to laugh and agree; this is not an unusual sentiment. Cornell is culturally derisive towards STEM majors, who make up the majority of students in their masses. Sometimes these jabs are based in real frustration with ethics or ignorance or job-prospect snobbery; often they are cruel for the sake of it: Computer science majors don’t shower; engineers have no social skills or morals; premeds are insane; CALS students are dumb farmers. These are stereotypes based in some shred of unpleasant reality.
Cornell’s STEM programs introduce students to a dense, time-consuming workload that is most efficiently studied in isolation, or taught in antisocial, anonymizing lecture halls. Students compete for a preferable percentile on a grading curve that fractures cooperation. The stress and time commitment of a rigorous schedule takes a toll on physical health and hygiene; it restricts a social calendar; it strangles personal presentation and… fashion. Moreover, STEM programs tend to draw less affluent students; these financial and social incongruities contribute to the disparities in lifestyle between those frequenting Zeus or Duffield. STEM students have less time and money and manners and friends. Hostility, awkwardness, derision. The worst human being ever was a Cornell engineer.
But before you are a Cornell engineer, you are just a young adult who is really, really stressed. There is a human body leashed to every ambitious 18-year-old. When it is deprived of socializing and hygiene and sleep, it stagnates and compromises. Fatigue is pervasive, and it is corrosive to life and happiness.
It is redundant: to suggest to college students that they are overworked. It is almost insulting. There is a loss of control inherent to modern society, by which a human being is bound to vast forces (corporations, institutions, governments) and to the social expectations commanded by such forces, to the extent where they may lose their basic bodily autonomy. At Cornell, a student is bound to their coursework through social obligation, culture and family and peers, but also through the expectation of the market, the American system of capitalism that demands educated bodies, and the industry of academia, which demands the same in the name of knowledge and discovery.
These demands force their will upon a human life until it is remolded in their image. These demands force their will upon the human body until it is sleepless and ugly. It is personally invasive and disturbing to feel your body exploited by your own education; it is not at all uncommon, in the course of human history, to give—or to lose—your body to a force beyond your control. So,
of course students should prioritize their wellbeing. This is not really compatible with the life that most students are embedded in, and the future that one would imagine themself inhabiting. There is no easy way out of this. So,
there is Duffield at 4 a.m.
The rain has yet to let up; there is no more music or laughter. The sleepiest and most intrepid students have braved the storm to go home by now, and the rest are hedging their losses and filtering out. By 5:30 a.m, there will be maybe one or two people left, and a faint gray light will begin filtering over the atrium floor. Some Mattin’s workers will be arriving and preparing for a 7 a.m. opening.
Behind this building is the Cascadilla gorge, an artifact of the glaciers that once covered Upstate New York. When they receded some 20,000 years ago, they tore some of the land back and stripped the rock to expose Devonian layers. The gorges were formed as icy fingernails dug stubbornly into earth.
The people arrived after the glaciers. Gayogohó:nǫˀ people, then the Dutch, then the English; and then the students, and the buildings, White, Mcgraw, Morrill Hall; the roads and the libraries, Mann, Olin, then Statler. Duffield.
The students sweep over this land in intervals (four years, maybe five, six, seven) and then leave; and they take with them a diploma and a dream, and this place takes something from them too. There is the long homeward sidewalk en route to my bed in West Campus, the blurry sun that rises too soon and the night that falls too fast, the blank restless walls of study rooms. There are the freshmen chattering awkwardly at project team fest, the CS majors hunched over their desks and the engineers filling chalkboards with gibberish and the premeds bitching about organic chemistry, the belching fume hoods and ruminating machinery, the caffeine, the massive lecture halls, the eyebags, the prelim that you failed, the class that made you contemplate switching your major, bombs in the Middle East, the Trump administration, Cornell Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, the despair, despair, despair. And between all of it are those vast gorges and beyond are the long remote swathes of Upstate New York and above are the clouds and the rain and the rain. There is you and your finite body and your ambitions for an adulthood that is much harder than you could’ve imagined.
Today we are here, wearing down the pavement, treading over dead leaves and grass that dies and resurrects and dies. Twenty thousand years from now there will be no Duffield or Cornell Engineering, just the absence of something vast on the banks of a gorge that may or may not still exist. Last night is already extinct. The body will mend its fatigue eventually: maybe winter break, maybe after grad school. The intensity of the present moment will fade into blurry memory, and everything enormous and insurmountable will subside. In the meantime, there is no meantime. I will finish editing this, fall asleep, and get up in three and a half hours to go to chem lab. I feel that I must not stop moving forwards. Goodnight.