Liberal arts colleges are often characterized by their cluster of unique, different, and uhh quirky characters! While most people can only tolerate one liberal arts institution at a time, the Claremont consortium generously pushes everyone to their limit.
Despite the vast number of people (<5000), it is common courtesy among students to memorize the names of philosophers and “follow” their teachings based on which TikTok aesthetic board they related to the most, or which name feels nicest in their mouth.
Students across campus share their participation in this tradition and their own personal belief systems. “No, yeah – I mean I’m personally in my Albert Camus era um… He definitely has a dark academia vibe and I’m down with the absurdist tradition he talks about. I’m a performance artist so i get it”, says a Pitzer sociology major.
A Pomona philosophy major exclaims, “the panoptic gaze is something that I constantly think about – I mean I cannot believe there are people out there who don’t know about Foucault and his academic rebellion.”
These young academics are part of a large majority of students that work to ALWAYS meet some arbitrary word count in conversations and use a new big word every day!
While most people call this pretentious, students have self-identified this environment as being innovative and academically enriching and not like those big sports schools where they have fun games and real parties.
Like most of those kids probably don’t even know about Kafka and Virginia Woolf. They probably don’t even understand American Psycho and Pulp Fiction and that Tame Impala is just ONE GUY.
While previously this fruitful practice was not questioned, professors are now calling for a change. As a prerequisite to entering a humanities class, students now must name at least 5 works by philosophers whose names they drop.
A Scripps professor says, “If I walk into class and hear some twerp talking about how ‘kafkaesque’ some line in the history reading is – I’m going to lose it. These students need to understand that a 10:1 student to faculty ratio does not mean that I have to like you or think you are smart.”
A Pomona professor adds on, “being fruity does not mean that you are now Hegel coded – blah blah dialectics, I’m pretty sure half of those philosophers were homophobic”.