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ABOUT THE QUICK TAKE Every Friday, the Quick Take columnists will offer their views on an issue of significance to American University. Notable members of the campus community will also be invited to contribute to this new feature. Suggestions for topics and other ideas from readers are welcome and encouraged, so please submit comments to edpage@theeagleonline.com. |
Everyone knows Bill Clinton came to campus last Friday. For the most part, the former president’s speech was well received. But students are still reacting to his newly acquired “Wonk of the Year” status. Will our campus community be more accepting of the controversial WONK campaign? Or is the award simply window dressing on an unwelcome brand? The quick take columnists weigh in:
Joe Gruenbaum
Why WONK isn't deserving of Bill Clinton
Rachel Lomot
AU students will never identify with WONK
Why WONK isn't deserving of Bill Clinton
By Joe Gruenbaum
When I bought my ticket to see Ol' Bill, knowing the university’s shameless marketing, I assumed that the message would beat WONK’s glory into our minds with the sledgehammer of a former President’s influence. On that front, I wasn’t completely disappointed.
But Bill Clinton does not exemplify a WONK, at least not in the American University sense. He is better than that. And as long as AU as an institution, our students, approach knowledge with the WONK attitude, we will remain an aesthetically pleasing commercial excuse for a university.
It’s bad enough that a “selective” private university thinks it necessary to start an advertising campaign encouraging the idea that knowledge is a good thing. Thinking about it makes me shudder. But the real problem is that knowledge is thought of as a commodity, accrued after years of schooling and passed from professor to student for $55,000 a year. We are using the trade school conception of knowledge at a supposedly rigorous academic institution.
That kind of environment doesn’t just stifle dissent; it forgets that independent thinking even exists. There is no creative conversation, no dialogical reason pushing back on the status quo. And our supposed interdisciplinarity is only methodological—instead of creative inquiry into the foundations of knowledge in each field, we selectively borrow tools from other academic islands when they suit our pre-formed paradigms.
Our model of education teaches students not to think outside of the box, but instead how to get a job within the box. We WONK technical specifics, but large concepts and theories are lost in a jumble of data most students don’t understand anyways.
Clinton’s speech, however, almost made me cry out with joy. Pre-historic anthropology, particle physics, and micro-biology combine to define the human connection? Bill, where have you been all my life? To think in those terms takes more than knowledge—it takes an intense love of learning and inquiry. That’s the kind of thing I came to college for. Not to pick up a toolbox of skills I can use on the job, but to shake the very foundations of my reality. Even Karl Marx, convinced of an eventual communist utopia, did not consider his own beliefs above reproach. When asked to give his favorite epitaph, he offered de omnibus disputandum (“Everything must be doubted.”)
Bill Clinton is the kind of brilliant, skeptical, inquisitive thinker that WONK fails to represent. And unfortunately at AU, such intellectual curiosity, divorced from shiny careerism, is almost dead. WONK is just driving the knife a little deeper.
Why students will never identify with WONK
By Rachel Lomot
President Bill Clinton couldn’t help but laugh as he said “Thank you for making me the first ‘Wonk of the Year’.” I am not sure if anyone say that seriously. It just sounds too funny.
Former President Bill Clinton received the “Wonk of the Year” award last Friday. Being the first of its kind, students didn’t really know what to expect. What do you talk about when you become a wonk?
Turns out, when you’re a “wonk” you talk about shared responsibility, social struggles, physics’ string theory, the human genome, economic growth and stability. Who knew? Students have brought such a negative connotation to the word that we forgot AU’s original message. President Bill Clinton embodies it – the passionate academic. It all sounds great, but student opinion of the WONK campaign will not gain support until the word itself is changed.
I asked my floor-mates if “wonk” will ever be a cool term, if this award will ever be treated as prestigious. Gabriela Christie, a freshman in the School of International Service, says, “Wonk won’t be cool, the ideas that are attached to it are exactly what an AU student is, but the name does not do it justice.”
When you look in the dictionary online “wonk” is not a term students want to identify with. “Wonk”, first and foremost, is a student who spends much time studying and has little or no social life. I can see why we are so opposed.
So what is the future of “wonk?” Caroline Handel, a freshman in the School of Communication, remarks, “I just hope they give it a better name.” Every student I asked had the exact same response. “Wonk” is not cool and will never be.
So where is the future of this campaign? Students will complain, ads will continue to run, and awards may or may not be given. But I do not think that’s the point here. Clinton proudly stated, “I loved when people made fun of me for being wonkish because I figured that people wanted a president who actually knew something.”
It doesn’t matter what we are called. Frankly, when I first got here it wasn’t the WONK that caught my eye but all of the words that followed it: smart, passionate, focused and engaged.
Truth is: It’s not the word that matters, it’s the meaning. It’s not the dictionary definition, but how we hold ourselves. President Bill Clinton is proud to be a wonk because he is proud to be knowledgeable.
Let’s reverse the saying to emphasize the most important aspect of WONK. Let’s be students who KNOW.
