First Impressions

Diary Entry: November 11, 2016

When we delve into the “idea of America”, what is that central thesis, that shining myth, which first comes to mind? I cannot speak for others, but for me this image was always based on democracy, fetishized “freedom of speech”, and a seemingly instinctive openness to everything new.

Hollywood, of course, offers a grotesque caricature. I understand this. However, a person still always arms themselves with certain perceptions and carries a carefully selected set of expectations about how reality should “play out”.

In my imagination, American academia was always a theater of heated debates. I pictured lecture halls humming from engagement and a genuine collision of a thousand kinds of ideas; people who were not just talking, but competing with each other in expressiveness — as if it were a kind of intellectual Olympiad to reveal who could express their position more freely and creatively.

Perhaps this vision was naive and less fitting for the real mechanisms of the academic process. But, at the very least, I expected that people would still be cast in this mold and have this inner fire, regardless of how much the institution would give them full permission for self-expression.

However, what I observe here is a bit strange. This is not the America of glossy brochures.

On the other hand, I realize that it might simply take time to decipher local customs. And first impressions, as is universally known, are unreliable narrators.