Potential Question:
How does the liminal college experience shape the person in finding the unachievable balance of academics and a social life?
How does college provide a sense of self-satisfaction?
How does college help people find satisfaction among society and personal desires?
How does the college atmosphere create a psedo-environment in which people can find thier "real" self?
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I think you may be onto something here, but you are going to have to find a productive way to frame it. There may be a number of avenues you could pursue in trying to do that. Here are two that occur to me, and they are not even mutually exclusive (meaning you could do both in the same paper).
ReplyDelete1) You could begin by looking at what Victor Turner meant when he coined the term "liminality" by looking at some of Turner's work (perhaps "Liminality and Communitas"). You should also look more closely at Moffatt's book (most of which is online at Google books as I point out on our blog) at where he discusses Turner's work and its application to studying college life. How does the transformation of college life compare to the sort of rites of passage that Turner describes? How do they differ in terms of community and self? What do you make of that difference?
2) You could also explore this topic by first looking at the goal of the liberal arts in creating a free citizenry, and the social function (and historical role) of college as creating a place where students can freely choose and formulate their own ideas. Part of the tradition of college has been to expose students to "the best that has been said and thought in the world" so that they can make up their own minds in dialogue with the "great minds" of our culture and thus discover and clarify what they themselves believe -- all in an atmosphere free of the confining influence of parochial and parental beliefs. That's perhaps the main goal of the liberal arts curriculum: to liberate the minds of students so that they are free to form their own beliefs. The idea is that college then becomes a "liminal space" of personal transformation so that freshmen children take ownership of culture and are prepared to enter society as free-thinking adult graduates.
What is interesting is that the "social life" of college (or simply "college life") has developed in opposition to the academic realm of the liberal arts and is now seen as _the_ site of authentic self discovery -- where a student can discover his or her "self-satisfaction" and "real self," as you put it. The "liminal" space of self-transformation is imagined as taking place at parties or in private sexual relationships rather than in classes designed to develop "the life of the mind."
It would be a very interesting project to describe the way that these two college institutions -- the liberal arts curriculum on the one hand and "college life" on the other -- seem to address some of the same issues. It might even be argued -- though you would have to find evidence to support this -- that college life has taken the place of the traditional liberal arts curriculum and subsumed much of the social function of the liberal arts. After all, you probably can show how the liberal arts have declined at the same time that "college life" has been on the rise (though this has as much to do with the rise of careerism, but that may also be a related development).
How might "college life" have taken over the "freedom" function of "the liberal arts"? And to what ends -- good and bad?