Almost everyone has heard Notre Dame’s campus referred to as “the bubble.” Usually, bubble terminology is used to describe the ways in which Notre Dame students are disconnected from the larger South Bend community, or the ways in which many students live unaffected by or unaware of many social and political problems in this country. Notre Dame is continuously seen from the outside as a Catholic ivory tower of sorts, sheltering oblivious children of opulence. Although many critiques of Notre Dame communicate valid points, I identify the bubble of Notre Dame not as its campus or its Catholicism or its wealth, but as the constant pressure to achieve “success.”
I genuinely believe that the majority of Notre Dame students are hyper-aware of both their privilege in attending this University and in their responsibility to be invested in our larger society. For instance, my friends constantly inspire me to be more connected and involved. One of my friends organized a trip to the Mexican-American border in Arizona, to take place over our spring break. With a group of similarly inclined students, she will link up to a humanitarian organization that works to provide struggling migrants with supplies and support. Last summer, my other friend worked in a home for struggling mothers and their babies, in order to provide technical training as well as emotional support and community. A few of my other friends are very involved in the city council of South Bend, working to support Mayor Pete Buttigieg and attending conferences regarding the promotion and implementation of sustainable practices in South Bend. All this to say that I feel inspired and lucky to be surrounded by people who care so deeply about the betterment of our community and society. They constantly remind me that the students at Notre Dame are so much more than bubble living.
Notre Dame is not suffering from any lack of passion or love for others. However, the academic culture at Notre Dame only encourages isolated service trips here and there and seems more and more to be pushing “success” (academic and future career success, specifically) over all else. If I had a penny for every time someone asked me, “But what are you even going to do with a degree from the Program of Liberal Studies?”, I would have enough money to pay for next year’s tuition.
We, as students and as an institution of “higher learning,” have constructed our own restrictive bubbles out of lofty academic expectations that have no real-life value. Higher learning does not mean “whatever it takes to get to Wall Street” or even “whatever GPA it takes to get into grad school.” Higher learning means integrating classrooms and lives. Higher learning means being personally motivated and invested in your own education, not for the sake of your parents and not for the sake of your transcript but because you love what you are learning and because you are overwhelmingly privileged and lucky to be able to attend college. Higher learning means working hard because you want to have the tools to achieve your dreams but it also means skipping that reading assignment once in a while to stay up in LaFun with your friends, talking about religion and art and literature and which boys you think are cute in your 9:30 class. It means, once in a while, wine and magazines and glue-sticks and watercolors on the floor of your friend’s dorm room, even if you do have that huge essay to write by Monday. It means spontaneous nose piercings, concerts, and Sound of Music snuggle puddles. It means allowing yourself to become overwhelmed in class by what you just read because it is so stunning that it saturates you for a moment.
My aim in writing this article is not to deter people from trying their best academically, my aim is to widen the bounds of how “education” is understood. Education is not only what we learn in classrooms but also what we learn from interacting deeply and authentically with the people and the spaces around us. I have no doubt that the bubble of Notre Dame is not due to a lack of ferocious energy and brave spirits from our students, but from an academic structure that values future law internships over the beautiful current.
A professor last semester once told my class, upon reading “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” that he remembers his college years as “traveling in the realms of gold.” The trick is to recognize the golden years while you’re living them.