Senior Retrospective | Brian Farkas

I had never been in love before. I had loved things and events and maybe even people, but I'd never been in love before. Until this place came along. This "ridiculous pink-and-gray college," as Edna St. Vincent Millay '17 dubbed it in a 1915 letter to her mother. "If there had been a college in Alice in Wonderland, it would surely be like this." Why have I fallen so hopelessly, deeply in love with this ridiculous place?

Maybe I should back up. I'm a New Yorker, heart and soul. I was born and raised in the city. I never really understood how that defined me until I arrived in Cushing. God-forsaken Cushing. Unless you experience it, the move from Manhattan to Main Street, it's hard to explain. It feels something like a twisted-falling-backwards into another time. The people walk more slowly here. Their bodies and minds inch along without any sense of impending anything.

Vassar's "culture"—as far as it can be pinned down—is lazy, artsy, ironic, uncompetitive, motionless and purposefully, self-consciously weird. Most wake up at 11 a.m.
On all counts, I didn't fit in. I went to bed late and woke up early. I came to Vassar highly competitive. I'm a type-A. My high school taught me to strive to be the best, and to go to a school that's the best.

How surprised I was to learn that people here don't even believe that there can (or should?) be a "best." They believe in this bizarre, "everyone's a winner" postmodern shiftiness that lacks purpose and direction. They strive for their "personal best"—personal greatness instead of universal greatness. It was a quality of the students that made my freshman year excruciating and infuriating.

But then I found The Miscellany News. Or maybe it found me. The incredible group of purposeful editors—who populated an obscure room on the third floor of the College Center—greeted me with open arms. They were unlike those on the first two floors of the building. They had deadlines. They were purposeful. They made their lives about improving something—the newspaper. It was a small thing, but it was a thing that needed improving. Something I could wrap my arms around and throw myself at heart and soul. And so I did.

Improving a newspaper taught me about the issues contained within that newspaper—the issues facing Vassar itself. And so I ran for student government. I served as Vice President for Operations of the Vassar Student Association. My student colleagues here, too, were purposeful to a fault with an eye toward the future. They care about this place; they want it to be the best. Not like most Vassar students, who seem to want to be embarrassed by Vassar's greatness. The experience was an education unto itself. To sit with the College's top administrators and participate in long-term decision-making—particularly on the heels of the worst recession since the Depression—was spectacularly enlightening. (Vassar's top administrators, by the way, are New Yorkers, or at least they might as well be. They clearly aren't from here.)

Anyway, somewhere along the way, between seeing Vassar's problems and brainstorming the solutions, I fell in love. I fell in love with this almost mythical Vassar—a para-Vassar. A Vassar that worked toward better things. I fell in love with a Vassar that existed only within a very small segment of the campus population. That Vassar is competitive. It has a deep sense of its own greatness. It's athletic. It screams and it brags.

If I had gone to another place, one of those already-perfect stereotypes, I doubt I would have fallen in love. I would have liked it. I would have worn the Amherst t-shirt and gone to the big Middlebury basketball games with friends. My Yale Polo half-zip would have been a nice shade of sky blue, to match my Columbia binder.

I would have liked it. But I wouldn't have felt deep burning passion—the kind that comes only with ownership. I'm not talking about pride. I'm talking about an ownership of an idea of a place that buries itself inside of you. When Vassar receives a major gift or hosts a world-famous speaker, I feel a sense of inward movement, that I myself have made progress toward some greater ideal. When we cannot overcome our own small-minded and self-interested bastions of faculty members, I feel failure.

At Vassar, we can strive. Harvard can't. It already is. There's no upward mobility, no sense of recognizable progress. Only guilt for being the best, and fear for what downfall tomorrow will bring.

There's something powerful about that perpetual sense of "almost there"—something powerful about being so close. There's something so quintessentially American about the continual urge to build a place to be "more perfect."

It took me four years to realize that Vassar gave me the very education that I resented it for not giving me. It taught me those practical skills of communication and negotiation, it taught me to strive, to reach for the top. It did all of that while taking me on a winding, meandering path through the student newspaper, student government, and student philanthropy. My real Vassar education snuck up on me.

Love doesn't always make sense. Now and again, the kind of striving love that makes the least sense—the moderate type-A and the hippie type-B, the pragmatic New Yorker and the weird liberal arts college—is the most unshakable.

So my Vassar education did teach me to strive after all. In a roundabout and ridiculous way that befits this roundabout and ridiculous place. And in a more purposeful, passionate way than anywhere else could have.

—Brian Farkas '10 served as Vassar Student Association Vice President for Operations, Editor in Chief of The Miscellany News, and co-Chair of the Sophomore Class Gift and Senior Class Gift.