Rebellion of the Nerds
This article was officially syndicated...uh, well kinda anyways. Does electronically count? Probably not.
Published in the Daily Illini on March 27, 2006
Every year, new students roll on to campus expressing their newfound freedoms and rights. They rebel against their origins: their parents, their church, their hometown.
They think they are rebelling by constantly drinking and coasting through their education. But is that rebellion?
No. Rather, drinking and ignorance are the norm - they are conformists. While declaring a rebellion from the hopes of their parents and their school, they are actually conforming to the dominant campus culture. The OC-MTV culture prefers expensive bar drinks to free library books.
Who, then, are the rebels among us?
The real rebels have the audacity, confidence and courage to reject the dominant culture. The real rebels chase knowledge and truth until fatigue.
The rebels are invisible at night reading Emerson for fun, deriving equations not assigned by their professor, publishing political thoughts to the world on their blog or debating the origins of the Universe with friends. They head your Student Organizations and get A's in your classes. Rather than drinking until comatose in the Caribbean, the rebels use their spring break to alleviate poverty around the world.
They carve unique intellectual paths of resistance, curiosity and progress, rather than the ease, comfort and mediocrity of conformity. They are the upcoming generation of Cool Hand Lukes, "natural-born world shakers." Whereas the conformist seeks to find the identity and the composition of the group, the rebel seeks to find the identity and the composition of himself.
Many look at the 1960s and 70s as the time when the Hippies rebelled from established culture. But they led an uneducated and misguided rebellion. The real rebels were people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak. Their rebellion remodeled our world.
Most of my peers blindly follow and march in step with the dominant intellectually apathetic culture. Others have consciously chosen legitimate philosophies for why college should be four years of fun. They appear as conformists, but actually rebel in their own way.
But, I write for the mass of students who have been stolen by the dominant campus culture. I write for those who have a thirst for intellectualism but see no alternative to the pervasive conformist culture.
I do not know the best way to live - after all, I'm just a punk who was mistakenly given a column. I do not suggest a Puritan life.
The culture that I critique is exactly what makes Illinois students unique and more well-rounded than our supposedly superior Ivy League peers. Harvardvarks lack the social skills, easy-going personalities, and friendliness that Illinois cultivates.
Illinois allows students to develop both intellectual and social skills. U.S. News does not know how to quantify and rank that kind of balance.
The problem is that most students have abused the social liberties granted by the University's atmosphere. Instead of fusing social and intellectual pursuits, most choose to cultivate only their social skills. This majority has become the dominant culture and publicly represents our undergraduates by consistently ranking Illinois as a top 5 party school.
The conformists and the rebels both give us valuable lessons on how to spend our four years. The challenge to University policymakers and individual students is unleashing the rebel to push back the advances made by the conformists. I hope for a symbolically violent rebellion to restore the balance.
Somewhere we lost sight of our original goal. Why are we at a University with the world's greatest minds if not to feverishly learn from them?
We all have the choice. We have the opportunity to comfortably avoid challenges or to bravely face them. Our four years allow us to choose whether we will improve the world or leave it without a trace.
Our Founders believed strongly enough in the experimental idea of democracy to declare war on the world's greatest military power. Learned revolutionary spirits built America, not conformists.
The American Revolution continues today by the hands of the campus rebels in an ever-unfinished pursuit to make humanity better. Their rebellion lies in seizing the opportunities presented by the University to better humanity, rather than marching in line with the mass of conformists who change little.
Billy Joe Mills is a senior in LAS. His columns appear on Mondays. He will long remember writing alongside his rebellious friend, Josh Rohrscheib - farewell. He can be reached at opinions@dailyillini.com.
Published in the Daily Illini on March 27, 2006
Every year, new students roll on to campus expressing their newfound freedoms and rights. They rebel against their origins: their parents, their church, their hometown.
They think they are rebelling by constantly drinking and coasting through their education. But is that rebellion?
No. Rather, drinking and ignorance are the norm - they are conformists. While declaring a rebellion from the hopes of their parents and their school, they are actually conforming to the dominant campus culture. The OC-MTV culture prefers expensive bar drinks to free library books.
Who, then, are the rebels among us?
The real rebels have the audacity, confidence and courage to reject the dominant culture. The real rebels chase knowledge and truth until fatigue.
The rebels are invisible at night reading Emerson for fun, deriving equations not assigned by their professor, publishing political thoughts to the world on their blog or debating the origins of the Universe with friends. They head your Student Organizations and get A's in your classes. Rather than drinking until comatose in the Caribbean, the rebels use their spring break to alleviate poverty around the world.
They carve unique intellectual paths of resistance, curiosity and progress, rather than the ease, comfort and mediocrity of conformity. They are the upcoming generation of Cool Hand Lukes, "natural-born world shakers." Whereas the conformist seeks to find the identity and the composition of the group, the rebel seeks to find the identity and the composition of himself.
Many look at the 1960s and 70s as the time when the Hippies rebelled from established culture. But they led an uneducated and misguided rebellion. The real rebels were people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak. Their rebellion remodeled our world.
Most of my peers blindly follow and march in step with the dominant intellectually apathetic culture. Others have consciously chosen legitimate philosophies for why college should be four years of fun. They appear as conformists, but actually rebel in their own way.
But, I write for the mass of students who have been stolen by the dominant campus culture. I write for those who have a thirst for intellectualism but see no alternative to the pervasive conformist culture.
I do not know the best way to live - after all, I'm just a punk who was mistakenly given a column. I do not suggest a Puritan life.
The culture that I critique is exactly what makes Illinois students unique and more well-rounded than our supposedly superior Ivy League peers. Harvardvarks lack the social skills, easy-going personalities, and friendliness that Illinois cultivates.
Illinois allows students to develop both intellectual and social skills. U.S. News does not know how to quantify and rank that kind of balance.
The problem is that most students have abused the social liberties granted by the University's atmosphere. Instead of fusing social and intellectual pursuits, most choose to cultivate only their social skills. This majority has become the dominant culture and publicly represents our undergraduates by consistently ranking Illinois as a top 5 party school.
The conformists and the rebels both give us valuable lessons on how to spend our four years. The challenge to University policymakers and individual students is unleashing the rebel to push back the advances made by the conformists. I hope for a symbolically violent rebellion to restore the balance.
Somewhere we lost sight of our original goal. Why are we at a University with the world's greatest minds if not to feverishly learn from them?
We all have the choice. We have the opportunity to comfortably avoid challenges or to bravely face them. Our four years allow us to choose whether we will improve the world or leave it without a trace.
Our Founders believed strongly enough in the experimental idea of democracy to declare war on the world's greatest military power. Learned revolutionary spirits built America, not conformists.
The American Revolution continues today by the hands of the campus rebels in an ever-unfinished pursuit to make humanity better. Their rebellion lies in seizing the opportunities presented by the University to better humanity, rather than marching in line with the mass of conformists who change little.
Billy Joe Mills is a senior in LAS. His columns appear on Mondays. He will long remember writing alongside his rebellious friend, Josh Rohrscheib - farewell. He can be reached at opinions@dailyillini.com.
posted by Billy Joe Mills at 12:22 AM
19 Comments:
BJM - I really think this is one of your best columns. I've walked behind kids on the quads bragging that "I got so drunk last night it was unreal," like that takes some special kind of talent.
I love the Cool Hand Luke reference - and I found the by line very touching. Thanks bro
I really liked how this turned out. Great Job Billy! :)
Hi BJ, I hope that your Spring Break was enjoyable.
I do have a bit of umbrage in reference to your statement about Hippies. There was a splinter group of "Techohippies" within the mainstream group of commie, agrarian dropouts that believed in the future of humanity from a Networking perspective. These were generally folks with engineering and science backgrounds, but a radical outlook.
Formost among these was a fellow named Stuart Brand, who started the Whole Earth Catalog. Along with some members of the Grateful Dead, he began The Well, which was one of the first intentional Internet communities. Out of this organization came the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which has been fighting on the forefront of the intellectual property controversy for years.
Technohippies also were behind an initiative that changed the face and economy of Champaign-Urbana--Prairienet, in which free internet access was given to everyone in Champaign County in the early 1990s--a lot of the present start-up and technical businesses in the area can be traced to this.
They also backed the concept of Project Gutenberg here, which now has many of the pre-1900 works of humanity online for public acess.
There were also people like Freeman Dyson's two children (of whom Esther pretty much saved Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic in the 90s) and Karl Hess, one of the founders of Libertarianism. A lot of people sell Hippies way short. This is a mistake--in many ways, our legacy continues.
Now that I've got that off my chest, I am interested in what is going to happen now that the Chancellor has said that Unofficial is going to come to a screeching halt.
Have no doubt that if the University *really* wants it to end, it will. I watched them dismantle Hash Wednesday a decade or so ago, and it went down quite nicely, thank you. [Before you say to me, "yeah, but reefer is illegal", remember that 3/4 of the undergraduates who are drinking are also breaking the law.]
Things are only fun until someone pokes their eye out. I figured that someone would get killed either this year or next, simply because the stupidity of that many drunk people is astonishing.
I think that the best thing that you at the DI and the Student Government could do right now is work with the Chancellor's Office to figure out some way to make the ending of the festival palatable to the student body at large.
Tom
Tom,
Thanks for your comments. Much of the "Technohippie" history is beyond my prior knowledge, so I appreciate the details on it. I agree that some good things came out of the hippie movement, some of which you list. I listen almost exclusively to hippie music. But I have always felt that the main thrust was misguided. Hippies had some core of great and progressive philosophy, but it was lost by a lack of leadership and focus...the drugs probably didn't help much either.
My position on Unofficial might be surprising after reading my column. While I personally do not drink alcohol at all and never have, I see a value in Unofficial, although not in our current state of affairs. If things were different, and intellectualism dominated our undergrad culture, then Unofficial would serve as an outlet for the pent up primordial aggression of studybugs. Unfortunately, nearly every weekend (a weekend which begins around Wednesday) is an Unofficial...so in our current state I see little way to defend it as a
"good" thing. However, I also think that it is impossible to stop Unofficial. If they ban a certain day the Irish Illini will simply set up plans for a different day, tit-for-tat changes.
Anyways, thanks again for reading and for your comments, Tom.
It's the thrust and counter-thrust that worries me about the University's reaction to Unofficial. After all, it's existance in the first place is due to the reaction to the sort of things that were happening on St. Patrick's Day.
I don't drink myself (having used up my lifetime quota by the time I was thirty.) Unfortunately, I don't have a decent solution to the problem, just concern over overreaction on both sides.
Thanks for the interest in THs. Unfortunately, there's no good history/reference work on that part of the movement--maybe I should write one.
Tom
Man, I have to watch those damned apostrophes. Sorry about that.
Tom
w00t! Go nerdiness, knowledge and not drinking! What's the point of college anyway if all you do is kill brain cells every night drinking? That only makes people come out of here dumber. I'm here to learn and to show my love for biology. <3 Nerd love.
To my friend Billy,
great article my friend. I really do enjoy reading your writings. I actually came across our school newspaper from high school and it was our senior issue and of course you wrote a terrific article then as well.
The whole "Let's get wasted and screw as many chick's as we can" game just boggles my mind. As a person who doesn't drink because of many good reasons, you could say that I am biased. But there really is no point to the pastime of wastedness. Every kid that I see who brags about getting drunk beyond belief, I just want to donkey punch them into next year. But it's just a waste of time to me to dealing with all of them. We just have to make good use of our time like you said and not worry about the crazy fools of our crazy generation.
Eric and Jessica,
My old EGHS pals. Thanks much for posting, your thoughts are much appreciated. Feedback is very valuable to me...right now I'm waiting on someone trashing me in the newspaper.
BTW, Eric I'm gonna kick pommel you guys in fantasy baseball this year...I love how something like that keeps the guys in contact.
Best,
Billy
People should not get the wrong idea about this article. As billy said in his comment to the Tan Commander, he does not feel that drinking on campus is the source of the problem. People of course should be held accountable for their own actions. If people decide to not be productive while at school, it will show up in their grades and whatever becomes of them after school.
At the same time, I do not feel there is anything wrong with going out and getting drunk. As long as people do it responsibly they should not be thought less of. Some of the comments in this thread are sounding like an AA meeting. Relax people, this IS college.
I think another important facet of this issue deals with money. I learned the value of a dollar quickly after I started working as a teenager. I talk to people on campus, and half of them have never seen the business-end of a broom before. Honestly, I think its pathetic. No wonder they think college is a time of debauchery and amusement, they do not realize how much their parents had to work to pay for their tuition.
In the end, it all comes down to parenting. While it is true that people are individuals, parenting plays a crucial role in today's society. It is also the source of many of today's problems. For some reason, after the hippies ruined the nuclear family, they decided that parents were retarded and needed to be coddled on every step of parenting...even though people had been raising children for millenia. The plethora of idiot college students are a direct result of parents that coddle their children.
And remember people, "BEAT YOUR KIDS!"
Tell you guys a story about how my dad instilled the concept of honest work into me before college.
We had a farm and a barn full of cows. Every winter, my job was to take the shovel, the wheelbarrow and some boots and remove the manure from the barn and wheel it to the top of a huge pile out behind it, where it would remain until spring when it was spread on the fields.
By the end of winter, the pile was actually larger than the barn itself. My father then said, in his heavily-accented English, "Now, see, if ya don't do well in school, dat's whatch'll be doin' da rest of yer life."
I've detested honest work ever since, and I attribute my success in life to that fact.
Jason, the nuclear family deserved to be shot right between the eyes. Two parents are not sufficient to raise children because child rearing is a job and a half, especially if you throw in real schooling. It was only in the post-WW2 period that it was even tried (families prior to the 40s having the uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins within a short hop).
The minute that easy divorce and easy birth control came into play in the late 60s, the nuclear family was doomed, leaving children now with one parent when 75 years ago, there would have been a half dozen people around to take care of the kids. The benefits and glory of the nuclear family is a cruel myth--extended families and clans seem to have been the natural mode of humanity through recorded history--RIP.
Tom
I am posting the following excerpt of a conversation b/w me and billy so that it may be recorded for posterity:
BJP5159: ok
BJP5159: $20
BJP5159: 3-1 odds
BJP5159: in my favor
BillyJoeMills: so you get 60?
BillyJoeMills: if you win
BJP5159: yes
BillyJoeMills: ok
BJP5159: that the chicago white sox make it to the world series
BillyJoeMills: post it on my blog
You are all witnesses.
Excuse me for saying so, I know everyone here grovels when Billy Joe Mills enters a room, but consider this...in order to refrain from washing his pants, the aforementioned BJM turns them inside out as to soil both sides equally. After a few weeks of this, the pants are then hung outside, because as we all know, fresh air cleans pants with equally soiled sides. The process is then repeated indefinitely until his mother decides it's time to wash them.
Tan Commander,
If everyone used your logic, we would be in a sad state indeed. No one would be a garbage man because people don't envy picking up trash all day.
I come from a family of plumbers, and I have spent countless days doing physical labor to pay my way through school. I do not look down upon the work as you do; on the contrary, I think it was a great experience, and I learned a great deal.
Doing a dirty job does not necessarily mean that it is a terrible job. In construction, it is extremely fufilling when a new building is completed to know that you were an integral part of the process. I would think it is the same for working on a farm. Too bad you missed out on that.
The nuclear family didn't just appear after WWII. In fact, it orginated as the Northwest European Marriage Pattern around the 15th - 16th Century. This tradition was carried to the new world where it has been the norm until today. The vast majority of families in america follow this pattern, so I have no idea what you're talking about.
Just because people don't live with all their relatives does not mean that they have no interaction with them. Growing up, 2 sets of aunts & uncles, my grandmother, and our family all lived in the same community. From my experience, this is a somewhat common occurance.
You speak of your opinions as if they are well-known facts. I think its pretty clear your ideals are not the same as most of America. So perhaps you should do some more research about your peers before you make grand sweeping comments.
BJM -
I am a little embarrased at being caught "red handed" of sorts. It is sad that I can see from your poignant analyis so many symptoms of conformity in myself. I wonder how I let this pass, and all the while I thought I was heading for distinction and uniqueness.
In any case, your article meant a great deal to me. I am glad this has dawned on me and now I can embrace my education and strive for it without feeling "uncool" or left out. I am sure there are hundreds if not thousands of likeminded individuals on this campus who find happiness in the simple company of each other.
I hope we are all able to achieve our potentials.
Jason, it's hard to look at my peers when so many of them are dead--aging diseases, HIV during the plague years, Vietnam, suicide, car crashes. (Not really serious, but just to point out that you should understand who I am before recommending such things to me.) My peers are vastly different from yours--they're more like josh's dad.
I want to counter your point concerning the virtues of honest work. I notice that you are coming from an emotional argument. I can't really argue *that* way, since it'd be like discussing religion with a fundamentalist.
Let me instead delineate the thesis that my father was actually trying to instill in me:
ONE OF THE BEST MEASURES OF HUMAN PROGRESS IS THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE AMOUNT OF LABOR TO PRODUCE A GIVEN RESULT HAS BEEN REDUCED.
In other words, the reason that this planet can support as many people are there currently are inhabiting it is not because of the virtuous labor of farmers, but because the amount of labor each one does per calorie of food has been reduced by many orders of magnitude in the last few hundred years.
The same can be said of transportation. The Wheel, pack animals, roads, railroads, bridges and the automobile are all attempts to make it easier for someone to move themselves and goods from place to place.
Communication, too--was the telegraph less virtuous than the Ponly Express because it took less labor to get the information across distances?
Interchangable parts, the assembly line, power plants--all of these were created to reduce the amount of physical labor needed for a given amount of profit.
I therefore hold that conceptual laziness (or the desire to make jobs require less labor in the future) is a virue of the highest order, since it increases the probability of the human race's long-term survival. Of course this is an opinion. However, as much as some people would not like to believe so, some opinions are a lot closer to reality than others.
As far as the extended family goes, I was not referring to a family all living under one roof as much as I was to such a family living within, say, 30 minutes walk of each other. This was the rule prior to the expressway system in America, rather than the exception. We might actually be in agreement on this one.
The two-parent household with no relatives nearby certainly wasn't present in our British ancestors--I can cite The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, for example. I believe if you use the definition that I just gave, you'll find little evidence of a nuclear family in it. It certainly was not true of the ethnics that emigrated to America.
The stretching of distances between family members really began in America with the construction of the Interstate system and the creation of the Suburbs, both of which occurred beginning around 1946.
And, by the way, tc stands for Tommie the Commie, an appellation given to me when I was a Freshman here in 1970. I was a Marxist until I found out there were easier ways to meet girls.
Tom
Leo,
To clarify for everyone, this is NOT Leo Buchignani, it is a different Leo on campus.
Anyways, I just wanted to say thanks for the comments...eerrr so I think. Some people have suggested to me that they think you are being sarcastic in your post, and so I am not sure whether to defend myself or to be happy. Regardless, I am just glad that you read the column and posted about it...hope to see you posting again in the future.
TC,
That is a hilarious little story about the origins of your TC nickname. Both you and Jason have made some interesting points about the family, and as you alluded to, it does seem that there are points of agreement.
Lastly, I wanted to say that I regret some things about this column. I regret not defining the "rebels" more broadly so that more people, the people I wanted, would identify with them. The newspaper title should have been "Rebellion of the Nerds" and I should have added a line like, "They are leaders in your RSO and get A's in your classes. The nerds."
I think that a lot of people identify themselves as nerds in someway, but I wanted to convey that the nerds are in fact the opposite of our usual connotative conception of them (us). We usually think of nerds as weak, but I believe it takes more courage and more rebellious spirit to be a nerd than a conformist...
Anyways, I want to hear someone's criticism, because I'm sure this column pissed someone off...please???
Let me comment on the nerd thing, BJ.
I think it's really funny that the guys that the bullies beat up in high school are now powering the economy.
I tried to address the issue earlier when I was talking about the Technohippies. These are the guys who were nerds that went weird in my generation.
Personally, I think that computer gaming and the Electronic Freedom Foundation are a good legacy.
I wish the BC-glasses contingent the best of luck in the coming years. You're in charge--don't ever let anyone else tell you different.
And remember the wonderful line from Revenge of the Nerds--"We're better in bed because jocks always think about sports. Nerds think about sex CONSTANTLY."
Tom
Who do you think makes progress possible? Laziness does not achieve progress; Ingenuity does. It isn't just scientists or other educated people that change the world. Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing by adopting the method developed in the Union Stockyards for slaughtering cattle and swine. Andrew Carnegie started working at age 11 and ended up controlling the steel industry by cunning, not education.
Even with progress, people still have to pick up the trash, run restaurants, and build buildings. You write with the arrogance of a person that has spent the majority of their life not in the real world, but sheltered on a college campus.
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