The Theory of Stanford

The Stanford Daily: May 30, 2014

As I prepare to leave Stanford, I have begun to make a mental recording of all that I see, as a sailor in the pre-photographic age might have stared at the objects in his room one last time before he embarked on a voyage that may take half his life. And under that light of dawn, where every object reveals its true form, I see that my time here has been utterly different from my childhood in Korea, my boarding school years in New England, and my two years of military service back in Korea after my freshman year—a difference marked not by uniqueness, for no hour is experienced twice, but by its unparalleled beauty.

Part of Stanford’s beauty has to do with personal history – the events that took place and the people I met here – a product of nostalgia that can clothe the most mundane coincidences with the garments of fate. However, much of it has to do with a kind of beauty that does not need interpretation, an a priori perfection self-evident even to the rabbits in Lake Lag. When I sit on the ledge of the fountain by the west entrance of Green Library and watch the sunset brim over the arches of the Main Quad, themselves framed by a sky reminiscent of a Rothko painting, I feel as if the heavens were made for me. It seems inconceivable that anything bad should happen in this world. For a moment, I feel invulnerable.

I know that this is an illusion. If my military service in the Republic of Korea Army during my two years of leave from Stanford taught me anything, it was the fact that a human being in essence is no different from a dog that children can drown for play. Within the first few days of boot camp, I realized that my former sense of identity was largely based on my social status, stripped of which I was a mass of bone and muscle that required a threshold amount of heat and food to survive. This was a very different definition of humanity from the one I had developed through my education at boarding school and Stanford and came as a great shock to me. But what was more surprising was that one got used to these conditions and survived on the stale biscuits they gave out between brain washing sessions where we were trained to kill North Koreans.

Some did not survive. On March 26th, 2010 forty-six soldiers drowned with their ship that was hit by a North Korean torpedo. In November 23rd of the same year two marines were killed by artillery shelling of an island off the western coast of Korea. I had been selected to be an interpreter after basic infantry training and spent the rest of my service behind a computer in the headquarters of U.S. Forces Korea, at the center of Seoul. My chances of dying in combat were practically zero. But attending funerals of soldiers my age and witnessing man’s helplessness at the cruelty of chance have since instilled inside me a perennial recognition of death that is like a frequency between silence and screech that only certain animals can hear.

I hear it even as I write this in a light-flooded room with the smell of cut grass in the air. Last month, a cruiser capsized off the southern coast of Korea with 475 passengers on board, 325 of whom were high school students on a school trip. The captain and the crew left the ship without giving orders to escape, and most passengers remained in their cabins, as they were told when the ship started tilting. At the moment of my writing 282 have been confirmed dead and 22 bodies are still missing. Videos recorded on the students’ phones of their last hours inside the ship have been recovered from their corpses and released by the media but I don't have the heart to watch them. I pause writing and try holding my breath as long as possible. The pain of suffocation is beyond my imagination.

The degree of empowerment one receives at Stanford is almost superhuman. Sometimes, looking at the night sky from the Oval after a run, I feel like I will outlast the stars. Surely, part of the sense of invulnerability has to do with youth itself. But it also has to do with what Stanford strives to teach us day by day: that the world is ours to change and that we have the power to change it. However, when faced with events such as the recent calamity in Korea, I find it difficult to reconcile Stanford with the rest of the world.

Stanford is not an accurate model of the world. Things that we take for granted here – and I don’t mean the weather, but rather basic conditions of life such as freedom from fear – are absent in the vast majority of the world. Having left Stanford, we will find that the knowledge of justice does not make us immune to injustice. We will be victimized by chance as much as others. The talk about designing one’s life will not help us against a tsunami or a brain tumor, whose form life takes far more often than a closed system where friction and air resistance are assumed to not exist.

Then what is the gift I take from Stanford if not the preparation for life after Stanford?

I have come to believe that the purpose of higher education is not to prepare one for life but rather to show what life can be. As an international student, my education in America as a whole has been a process of learning what humanity is capable of in abundance and freedom. Despite what some may think, America is a paradise compared to most of the world, and out of the vast expanse of her fifty states, Stanford may be her epitome. During my time here, as I witnessed Nobel-worthy discoveries like optogenetics, milestones in gender equality, and construction of wonders like the Bing Performing Arts Center, in the back of my mind there was a constant recognition of what I was seeing as a theory that must be tested outside the gates of Stanford. As graduation approaches, the sheer brilliance of this place seems almost unreal.

Some of us may choose never to leave Stanford. In fact, a significant percentage of alumni choose to remain in the Bay Area. That is your own decision to make. But to mistake the theory of Stanford for reality without testing it will only validate the criticism that higher education fosters an elitism that isolates one from the rest of the world. You might say that you do not want to have to do anything with the rest of the world. But you already know, from the one time you were able to bring happiness to another person’s life, that the gift of life cannot be received in isolation, that the most profound experiences of our lives are those experienced in the plural—though we enter and leave this world alone.

I too do not know what life holds for me. But to enable others to experience the beauty that I experienced here, to bring the theory of Stanford into reality in places without light or warmth – that is my goal, and that sense of purpose is the gift that I take from Stanford. Take a moment to appreciate the blessing that is your life right now. Life after Stanford will be difficult. But you will remember what happened here during these years. Also, what you know to be true. What you know is possible.