A Welcome Wake-Up Call

The campus empties in May — the underclassmen catch their flights and the seniors fill The Tombs. The days converge into a single week of liquor and relief. It’s all a prelude to hard work or unemployment, and it’s wonderful. You catch up with friends — and enemies. You laugh and cry. You reminisce.

I have some bland but cheery memories of this place — drinking with so-and-so, excursions to Cardozo, shouting matches with Freddy Moore (COL ’09), miscellaneous protests and that one Halloween where everyone dressed as Leonidas (in the midst of the “300” craze), to name a few. I recall some humorously and dreadfully embarrassing moments as well, but I will spare them from publication here.

The Class of 2009 Fund e-mailed the senior class a speech that one of our fellow graduates, Christine O’Conor (SFS ’09), delivered to incoming freshmen at each of the recent GAAP weekends. “I am jealous — excruciatingly jealous — of every student sitting in this auditorium … you get to embark on the best four years of your life,” she said.

The speech went on, and it was happy. I read it over a few times, and I objected. I resented the suggestion that Georgetown students tend to actually explore D.C., or that we are “100 percent diverse,” or that some inspiring number of us has graced the inside of a soup kitchen. I do not disagree with all that she said — I, too, am jealous of the incoming freshmen who won’t be needing jobs in the next few years — but I don’t glow when I think of Georgetown. There are people that I love here and I love them more than memories.

I’ve never met Christine, but she seems to have experienced Georgetown much differently than I have. We have learned different lessons: She’s learned ecstasy and I’ve learned supreme annoyance. Not outrage — I don’t do outrage — but I scowl a lot more than I did four years ago. The world where so many fancy, unread books with unbent spines are displayed with such proud pretense on our shelves should make anyone cringe — not because Virgil’s “Aeneid” is at all worth reading, but because the $200,000 undergraduate degree will convince us that we’ve learned things that we have not.

Disagree with Christine, or with me — either way, you’re on to something. “You chose to come to an Eastern college,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine in “This Side of Paradise.” “Either your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling quality of people, or you’d have gone through blind, and you’d hate to have done that.” Amory was talking about Princeton, but Georgetown wears the sentiment well. College yields different experiences to different people, and to me it’s been a battle of trivialities. We’ve survived a campus keg ban, Lauinger Library, April Fools’ humor and the Georgetown University Student Association. Life here is tame.

But we all learn something — you really can’t avoid it by the end. Georgetown has wrecked my once chipper disposition; I wouldn’t have it any other way. If this place hadn’t detonated some facet of my formerly high school self, for better or worse, I would have wasted thousands of dollars in tuition being here. I’d hate to have done that.

Georgetown is some work and all play. I could speak the happy language of college catharsis, but I believe that the hero antagonizes — if this place has prepared us at all to brave the world beyond these walls, we will go on to be much happier and to do much greater things than we have ever felt or done at Georgetown. We’ve lived four years of our lives in comfort and excess, though with some mild sleep deprivation at the end of each semester — not exactly the life of kings, but that comes later. That’s why we’re here; that’s why we move on.

I wish Christine and the rest of the seniors the best of luck as we take off down Prospect Street this final time. We depart, and the freshmen replace us. They will swiftly disprove the existence of God over light conversation in the dining hall; they will dispatch liberalism entirely with a single, well-laid quip; they will parse your every thought with a cache of Latin jargon. Their hipsters will misfire irony like our hipsters have for years. It’s all very silly, but I’ll admit that I’ve delighted in it all — this stuff of college Op-Eds.

Justin Charity is a senior in the College and the former president of Delta Phi Epsilon Professional Foreign Service Fraternity.

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