College as an incubator of Girardian terror
I went to a very large state school about 10 years ago, and was in school for six years and got two degrees. I&#x27;m really confused at the picture of university life this person is painting:<p>&gt; nearly everyone starts undergrad in the same way: After graduating from high school at age 18<p>&gt; It’s hard to construct a more perfect incubator for mimetic contagion than the American college campus. Most 18-year-olds are not super differentiated from each other.<p>&gt; Everyone starts out by taking the same intro classes<p>I&#x27;m not sure where this author went to college, but outside of a major city like London or NYC, you&#x27;d be hard pressed to find a more experientially diverse place (in America, at least) even amongst freshmen. Sure, there is class self-selection, but this seems like a really naive statement at best, and propaganda at worst. There were dorms specifically for married students, and the state gave tuition breaks to people older than 30. The only way you&#x27;d meet people who&#x27;d taken your classes is if you hung out in your department socially. There were many colleges in the university and hundreds of undergraduate courses: if you wanted to meet people who had no idea about what you were studying you just had to go to a different dining hall at a different time.<p>To be honest it seems like this person is observing that, in a large group small sub-groups will form based on all sorts of criteria like geographical closeness and experiential background, and within those groups &quot;memes&quot; will spread efficiently the more similar people are? This doesn&#x27;t seem novel or the basis on to which to extrapolate that somehow the result is negative or in any way new in society.<p>Anyway,<p>&gt; Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a knitting circle or hiking group instead.<p>now <i>that</i> is some advice I can get behind.<p>EDIT: After finishing the article it strikes me that this person may have gone to a school that would be in the set he describes as &quot;elite.&quot; I think this might have warped his worldview because they&#x27;re the only places where people can unironically imagine America as a &quot;meritocracy&quot; as described.