187_collegesurpriseWhen I was younger I used to think this campus was a golden land of opportunity and adventure. Then I got wise to the unconscious riptides of the place and have changed my mind.

The college reminds me of that old Middle Earth Roleplay adventure, Bree and the Barrow Downs. A prosperous center of human activity beside ancient storehouses of past effects now infested with evil spirits.

However, unlike that adventure there are no collective figures of help and guidance such as Gandalf or Tom Bombadil. Hek, there’s not even any organized resistance to the shadow like the Rangers of the North.

In other words, no lifeguard on duty!

When you consider that PDX is Torech Ungol with the Desperately Strange characteristic, it makes the college a pretty bleak place to be psychologically. Deadly high level adventures for young newbs.

What did I know when I was 18?

Not that the cookies, gumdrops and cakes of the Gingerbread House aren’t real. There were many delights I found to be experiences worth savoring.

The college outdoors program is top notch, arguably the best in the country. I was exposed to the beauty of what remains of nature and the wild in a way many people will never know.

The overseas program is excellent. I got to go to Japan and search for Godzilla. Along the way Japanese ghosts gave me a magnificent insight.

The computer program was ahead of its time. The dorm labs, the library center—these familiarized me with the desktop interface and prepared me for the Internet that would spring into mainstream existence shortly after I graduated.

That’s where my actual career emerged eight years down the line.

But a liberal arts education? That is, the classical liberalism ideal of what amounts to critical inquiry? Not much of that. Mainly fitting classes into a generic requirement of blocks—basic, intermediate and advanced.

The classes themselves were almost always all institutionalized preparation for a position in the white-collar industrial model, assuming you didn’t come from an upper cruster background (and I met many folks who had affluent parents). In that case, I guess you just went into the left-right or center-right wings of business.

Asking questions? That leads to questioning authority. Coming to your own conclusions? That leads to independent thought. Playing with the materials and figuring out how they work? That’s a little too scientific to be safe.

I ran into that wall again and again in my studies, not that I knew what I was bumping into. I just must have been missing the door, rite?

Wait, there’s no door? What you talkin’ bout Willis!?

The college recently started an entrepreneurial program. I had to laugh at the unconscious admission behind that.

All the best sages on innovation I read seem to agree that a liberal arts stance—that is, thinking outside narrow constraints through play as exploration—leads to entrepreneurial activity. If you’re a real liberal arts college, you got this down already.

So in a left hand way the college was positing that its own program was not in any meaningful way liberal arts!

I assume though, that they meant entrepreneurial in the sense of business—coming up with services or products to sell that will presumably reinvigorate the economy that’s in decline. You know; profits, and maybe some jobs.

I guess business degrees ain’t what they used to be in these modern medieval times.

I still remember the career guidance counselor asking me if I had ever considered a job in sales.

You craphound! If I wanted to go into sales I wouldn’t need to go to into indentured servitude to afford a college degree. I was dodging a trade presumably so I could learn how to unlock the full potential of my mind, you numbskull.

The college was full of barrow wights like that, preying on the vulnerabilities of young people as they bumbled around looking for a clue. I met a lot of students there who took too many blows psychologically and shipwrecked in one form or another.

Hek, I almost joined the list of Bermuda Triangle victims myself on a number of occasions.

I mean, if you want to model your thinking towards the needs of the owners of this country then this is a good place for it. You too can aspire to be an unquestioning master butler telling the other servants what to do.

For everyone else, well the old joke was that on the back of every Lewis and Clark degree was a job application for a McMenamins restaurant.

2 out of 5 Stars of the Magi