This sounds like a terrible way to spend a summer.
Ani Wilcenski writes at Tablet Magazine:
A Cruel Summer at Cornell“Why do you look dirty?” asked my mom when I got in her car. In the rearview mirror, 20 other teenagers stood on the front stairs, solemnly waving goodbye. Most of them were wearing maroon sweatshirts with a white “T” on the pocket. Some of them were crying. One of them, my friend Mark, cried so hard he was doubled over, hunched in the lawn away from the group while a stern woman watched him from a distance.I was crying too, slumped against the car window in tears for a full half hour as we drove away from Cornell. Amid my sobs, my mom reminded me that they’d barely heard from us all summer, and I never once wrote.Eventually, I gathered myself enough to open an envelope stuffed with handwritten notes.“I think you have a nice spirit. I worry, in your grouchiness, you won’t believe me. Oh well,” read one.“You are an individual of exceptional talent and questionable character,” read another.I started crying again, though it might have been from relief.Eight years after this car ride, in a recent article titled “A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell,” an instructor named Vincent Lloyd detailed his summer teaching a seminar for high schoolers on “Anti-Oppressive Studies.” As he tells it, the first day was sunny and full of hope. The students were curious, playful, and excited, having made it through the gauntlet of a 3% acceptance rate into the Telluride Association Summer Seminar to receive an all-expenses-paid scholarship to spend six weeks taking a college-level seminar at Cornell.By the fourth week, the students had stopped smiling. They learned to stay silent in discussions and cede their speaking time to the least privileged classmates. They voted two other classmates out of the program. And they put the professor himself on trial for a long list of offenses, from using harmful body language to misgendering Britney Griner. A month into the program, they’d learned that participation was conditional, intellectual freedom was overrated, and the world was so broken it could never change.In 2015, as a combat boot-wearing, poetry-writing high schooler, I was one of those students. Back then, it was called the Telluride Association Summer Program (TASP). TASPers would live in an intense, self-governed community devoted to democracy and discussion. The promotional materials sung of values like intellectual vitality, interpersonal awareness, and communal responsibility. Most TASPers ended up at prestigious universities, especially Ivy League schools, before fanning out into politics, academia, the sciences, and the arts. Telluride alumni included neoconservative theorist Francis Fukuyama, Democratic politician Stacey Abrams, and Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman.
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