Beware the ideal college experience

When I moved into my college dorm room in the mid-1990s I did so with a couple of bags of clothes, a few posters, an old black-and-white television, and some pieces of wood to build a bunk bed—which pieces of wood were decorated with an off-color engraving (courtesy of my buddy Scott) that I tried to shield from my roommate’s Quaker parents.

We all lived in the same rectangular cell and used the same utilitarian community bathroom down the hall, which was absolutely disgusting most of the time. Our rectangular cells each bore some semblance of our personalities but were absolutely nothing special—and I went to college with rich kids. We all had the same university-issued desks, the same university-issued analog phone, the same “scope book” (a booklet with everyone’s pictures and phone numbers of girls we would end up not calling) and a closet. If you were really clever, you’d put the TV in the closet (to save space) and situate your gross futon underneath the bunk to create a “study area” by which I mean an area in which to play Bill Walsh Football on a Sega Genesis.

Needless to say, nobody went to our university for the nice rooms and in fact, the fundamental crappiness was part of the charm and had a bit of a social-strata-leveling effect, inasmuch as whether your dad was a renowned vascular surgeon, a pastor, or a mechanic, your room basically sucked.

In this, my college experience was a lot more like my dad’s (he went to school in the 1960s) than my son’s (he just graduated). Many of his classmates operated under the spell of DormFluencers (apparently this is a real thing) who are giving advice, selling dorm-related products of all kinds, and even doing personalized design appointments to help teenagers (and their parents) stave off institutional blasé and create the dorm room of their very special dreams.

If the idea of a DormFluencer fills you with existential dread, that’s good, because it means that you are normal. If the idea of a DormFluencer fills you with thoughts of “huh, that sounds interesting, I bet I could do that,” one piece of advice would be to lay your phone on the garage floor and smash it to pieces with a ball-peen hammer.

I’m kidding, but only a little.

Of course, DormFluencers are only the symptom, because what happened after my generation went to college in gross dorm rooms in the 1990s, was that we got married, had kids, and then set about spoiling them rotten by wrapping them in existential bubble wrap, making sure they never failed, they were never hurt or disappointed, they always got “A’s,” and that their dorm rooms were awesome. And of course, we now throw up our collective hands in exasperation when they call us, sobbing, after some big meanie of a professor has the absolute audacity to give them a “B,” which is akin to shooting their dog and telling them they’ll never amount to anything.

I’m kidding, but only a little.

You see, what my generation has done—with its obsession with perfecting the imperfect dorm room—is create an expectation in our children that their college experiences will be perfect. Even though the very thing that was charming and noteworthy about our own college experiences was the fact that they were fabulously imperfect! We had bad dates. Our outfits were tacky and dumb. We didn’t love every professor, and the professors, in turn, didn’t always love us. We got “B’s” sometimes and lived to tell about it. Our comforters didn’t match the upholstery on our garage-sale Futons and it didn’t matter. Also, our parents basically didn’t care. They sent us to college and in doing so assumed we would handle our difficult profs, handle our relational dramas, and also handle our mismatched upholstery. Because what they sought to build in us was a sense of independence, which they (rightly) thought might serve us a little in the years to follow.

And because the rooms themselves weren’t perfect havens of rest we were forced to actually … interact. Which interactions were, of course, the most valuable thing we got out of the four-year experience. Because of the communal bathrooms, I would always pause to flex my triceps (I’m ashamed, and should be) in the skinny mirror belonging to a theology major in a room so neat you could eat off the floor. I figured I should actually say hello to him one day, and we’ve been talking pretty much non-stop for the last 30 years.

Because college in the 1990s wasn’t an exercise in customer service, it actually served us with best friends, character, and a little grit.