The Nature of College. James J. Farrell

      Although some wait until afternoon, most college students wake up early in the morning to the maddening sound of an alarm clock. As the contraption beeps or buzzes, Joe College reaches out of his slumber, hits the snooze button, rolls over, and goes back to sleep. This sequence replays repeatedly until at last he throws back the blankets and gets out of bed. He’s late again so he’ll have to hurry if he wants breakfast before class.

      Stumbling toward the bathroom, Joe begins a morning routine so well choreographed he should get a credit in dance for its flawless execution: He steps up to the urinal, relieves himself, flushes, shuffles to the sink, pumps the soap, washes his hands, dries them on a paper towel, aims a fadeaway shot toward the wastebasket, and reaches for his toiletries. Grossed out by his morning breath, he grabs toothbrush and toothpaste, turns on the water, wets the brush, spreads paste on the bristles, and begins to brush his teeth. In the mirror, his familiar face seems to be sporting a caveman wig, so today is a shower day, or at least a hat day. Spitting in the sink, Joe reels toward the showers and the dance continues.

      Joe’s sister, meanwhile, follows a related routine. She checks her e-mail, scans the news feed on Facebook, clicks the syllabus for Environmental Studies 101 to make sure she has the reading right, pulls up her Google calendar to confirm today’s activities, and heads for the showers. She lathers up, shampoos her hair, rinses with conditioner, shaves, and enjoys a few additional minutes of hot, steamy water before she concludes. Toweling off, she’s ready to brush and blow-dry her hair, and maybe apply a little makeup.

      Both students glance out the window to gauge the weather. They can’t really be sure how it might feel out there because they’re moving between rooms that are heated or cooled to temperatures in the seventy-degree range. Nature is burning or blowing to create this comfort zone, but they don’t notice because that’s just “natural.” So, naturally, they check weather.com and head for the closet with today’s forecast in mind.¹

      Like other college students, and most Americans, Jo and Joe College are practicing what Tim Clydesdale calls the “disengaged pragmatism” of everyday life, focusing on the tasks at hand and the day ahead, but not the meaning behind them. So far, the only time they’ve noticed nature was in the weather report. Waking up at college, they’re waking up in nature, but they haven’t noticed that yet. In this chapter, therefore, we’ll try to wake them up to the nature of their mornings as well.²

Alarming: The Cultural Work of Clocks

      It can be alarming to think deeply about an alarm clock. Normally college students notice it just twice a day, setting it at night and hearing it, regretfully, in the morning. But the time it tells transforms the whole day, and the world.

      Most Americans are obsessed with time, as our language suggests: We’re saving time or spending it, marking time or killing it. We have free time on the weekends—which seems to suggest that we have slave time most of the week. Many of us even feel like we’re doing time, caught in a prison of work and obligations. Whatever we call it, however, all of our times are structured by clock time, the social construction of weeks and days and hours and minutes that shape our appointment books and our lives. Like many of our technical marvels, clocks and watches are machines that do the work of social construction, converting nature into culture, and in this case, nature’s time into human time.³

      Historically, human beings adjusted their life cycles to the rhythms of day and night, and slept until they were rested or until they were disturbed—often by the call of nature. It’s a natural fact that human beings need sleep, and that animals, including humans, have circadian rhythms—cycles of brain-wave activity, core body temperature swings, hormone production, and cell regeneration schedules—that attune the body to the rotations of the planet. In the modern world, however, the body’s circadian rhythms proved too imprecise for the demands of capitalism: People who followed natural rhythms might be late for the factory work of the industrial revolution. So the body had to be broken to the discipline of mechanical time.⁴

      As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans were obsessed with time, always busy with the consuming passions of individualism: “The inhabitant of the United States,” he observed, “attaches himself to the goods of this world as if he were assured of not dying, and he rushes so precipitately to grasp those that pass within his reach that one would say he fears at each instant he will cease to live before he has enjoyed them. He grasps them all but without clutching them, and he soon allows them to escape from his hands so as to run after new enjoyments.” This culture, in which “rush hour” might be any hour of the day, has survived and thrived in America, leading to a society plagued by what sociologists call “time poverty.” In a culture of time poverty, we don’t have enough time for what really matters to us, because we’re too busy doing other things. Even at college, which is designed to be an interval of slow time in life, many students don’t make time for meaningful work or for reflection about their hopes and dreams because there’s “too much to do.” Our “lack” of time has environmental impacts because it drives us to convenience, where we often accept resource-intensive solutions to our time-management problems. We believe in fast food, for example, because we lead fast lives, circumscribed by the seconds of the clock.⁵

      An alarm clock tells us to get up and get to work “on time,” but in focusing our attention on today’s time it marginalizes other important times of our lives, like yesterday or tomorrow. Yesterday, the clock presumes, is just history, and tomorrow might as well be science fiction. Clock time is also just human time. It helps us get places on time, but it keeps us from considering natural time and—depending on our beliefs—supernatural time. By focusing our attention on the personal present, it keeps us from other temporal perspectives, perhaps until it’s literally too late.

       Past Time

      Despite their enrollment at an educational institution designed to pass on cultural traditions from the past to the future, Joe and Jo College are not generally good at thinking in time. Most of us, in fact, don’t remember—if we ever learned—the environmental history that would help us make sense of the present, so we don’t know why we act the way we do. We don’t understand why environmental problems have developed. We don’t know about environmental successes or histories of hope. Playing by the rules of American presentism, we don’t take time to think about the past—unless, of course, we’re stuck in a history course.⁶

      Whether we acknowledge it or not, however, we live in history, and dead men rule our lives. We inhabit the institutions dead men created and the buildings they erected. We learn from books they wrote and ideas they devised. Daily, we use the technologies they invented—amusing ourselves among the ghosts of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Philo Farnsworth. Most importantly, we live in the world that they developed, despoiled, or protected. When Columbus “discovered” America, he came in windpowered sailing ships, and encountered people who didn’t use fossil fuels. But we use lots of fossil fuels, because dead men later discovered coal and oil and exploited