Cornell and Competion

"Certain majors are for stupid people; philosophy majors are obviously smarter than Hotelies." Everyone here says that. "Certain fraternities are cool, and others aren't." At least that's what all the freshman are told, or led to believe when they get here. It's not like there's some official ranking, but people get the idea as soon as they drunkenly stumble into some party in some frat named after two different animals. You cannot meet someone at this school who does not tout these sort of claims all the time.

While these claims may be true, (maybe certain majors are harder than others, and maybe certain frats suck by certain standards), my point is not concerned with the social or intellectual superiority of anything at Cornell. My point is that people at Cornell engage in a sort of underlying competitiveness that pervades all aspects of social and academic contexts here. Take for instance the claim a lot of us hear all the time, one which I hear all the time because I live with an engineer: "it is hard for anyone to get above a C+ because the curve is so fucking high in CS 480: Something Really Fucking Complicated" (or whatever the class may be.) Statements like this are a product of the grading curve, which according to my calculations is employed by the majority of classes at Cornell in one way or another. The grading curve literally forces students to compete with each other for certain grades. If too many of your peers do well, you necessarily do not do as well. The grading curve exemplifies that the student body here is pressured to learn not so much for the sake of learning, but rather for the sake of achieving over other students.

Doesn't this hyper-competitive type of learning seem incongruent with what college learning should be like? I think so. Maybe this atmosphere does lead Cornell graduates to achieve more in life or get better jobs or whatever else it could potentially lead to. It just seems to me as though the process of learning, which is ostensibly one's purpose for going to college, is somehow hindered by the existence of an atmosphere which fiercely encourages each student to excel over others, or rather to do better in the place of others.