Here at Boston University, we are in the throes of our sixth orientation session, out of eight, for incoming undergraduates.  When you matriculate about 4,200 undergrads each fall, it takes a while to get them all informed about the workings of student life and registered for courses.  The existential situation of an incoming undergraduate has always been a source of both curiosity and compassion for me.  After all, I began my career in ministry as the Chapel Associate for first-year students here at Marsh Chapel.

Incoming freshmen face an array of challenges for which most of them are woefully unprepared.  For the first time for many of them, they are living away from parents and siblings and are squashed into small dorm rooms with people they have never known and who do not share the same life rituals into which they have been formed.  They must figure out how to manage their schedule.  This requires not only getting to class on time but also making sure to eat at least a couple of meals each day, build in time for exercise and appropriate amounts of extracurricular activities.  It requires navigating a campus, at least in our case, that is situated right in the middle of a major city.

All of these changes, and more, require what for some is experienced as a drastic shift in self-understanding.  Many students are coming from high schools where they were at the top of their class.  Here, being at the top in your high school class makes you about average.  Many students managed to attain a certain level of popularity in their hometown.  Here, the social capital in their account is reduced back to null.  The big ideas that inspired them to undertake a particular degree program are placed in the context of many alternatives and suddenly seem at least arbitrary, if not wrong-headed.

This existential dilemma results in some truly fascinating behavior.  Every single one of our incoming students will make a bad choice sometime during the first semester of their freshman year.  Some of those choices will prove more catastrophic than others.  Some will experiment with drugs and alcohol, others with sex.  Many will become overcommitted to extracurricular activities to the detriment of their course work.  Some will skip half of their class meetings and in turn express shock when their course grade is far below what they had achieved in high school.  Some are so convinced that they already know everything there is to know about everything that they will attempt to correct their professors about virtually every topic in the course.

I often say to my colleagues here at BU that if somehow a student made it through their degree program without learning anything in the classroom, but along the way we gave them the opportunity to fail and recover gracefully, then we will have succeeded in our mission as an institution of higher education.

What has been more than mildly amusing, even as it is simultaneously nerve racking, has been to watch the same dynamics I watch among first-year college students play out on the floor of the United States House of Representatives among their freshman class.  The majority of the freshmen Representatives are Republicans elected in the mid-term elections, many of them on the tea party platform.  Shall we see just how far the analogy between first-year undergraduates and the freshman class of Representatives goes?

The new Representatives are away from their families and the constituents who elected them for the first time since they started campaigning.  In Washington, they are squashed into small offices and they meet in a chamber that was really never intended for quite that many people.  The rituals of life in the House are far different from the rituals of life on the campaign trail, and are quite foreign to most, if not all, of them.  Unlike first-year college students, they have a staff to manage their schedule for them and help them get around.  (Although, having grown up right outside Washington D.C., it never ceases to amaze me how a half inch of snow can close down the whole city).

So too, freshman Representatives must make a shift in self-understanding from campaigning politician to governing legislator.  Clearly, having won the election, on the campaign trail they were on top of the heap.  Not so on the floor of the House.  This shift in social status seems not to have dawned on many of the freshman Representatives, who like the first-year students who think that they are in college to instruct the professors, think that their election gives them a mandate to only pass legislation that fulfills only their priorities with no room for compromise.  Like first-year students who must grapple with alternative visions, new House members are asked to grapple with many conflicting visions of how the government and the nation should be run.  Sadly, unlike most first-year college students, the freshman class in the House seems less prone to grappling and more prone to uncritically denying legitimacy to their colleagues with alternate views, let alone working toward compromise.

This brings us to the congruity of behaviors.  Of late, members of Congress have audaciously displayed some of the same proclivities toward experimenting with sex as some college students, although experimentation with drugs and alcohol have been less on the public radar for members of Congress than the admittedly significant problems with such on college campuses.  Even more congruous with many first-year college students is the tendency among freshman Representatives toward over-commitment, certainly in terms of time, as is true of all elected leaders, but also in terms of ideology.

When I was in Washington a little over a month ago with my girlfriend, we visited the House of Representatives.  She was aghast to discover a Congressman delivering a speech on the floor of the house to an empty chamber!  She asked in exasperated tones what the point of giving the speech was?  Is not the point of discussion on the floor of the House to bring your colleagues over to your point of view?  How is this possible if there is no one there?  Apparently, Representatives are at least as prone as college students to not turning up to class and then expecting stellar grades.

Now for the real problem.  The existential situation of the average first-year college student should be expected to align with their state of development.  There is a reason that student development theory has come so far to the forefront of student affairs.  Part of what students learn in college is to fail and recover gracefully.  The problem with freshman Representatives behaving much like first-year college students is that they are not in college; they are in Congress!  It is expected that people elected to the United States House of Representatives have developed to a point of maturity to have overcome such unfortunate behavioral tendencies, in part by having developed coping strategies for dealing with the underlying causes thereof.  Well, at least that is what we say we expect.  Apparently the electorate is prepared to accept far less.

As the very real possibility of a U.S. default on our debt rapidly approaches, the problem with freshmen has taken center stage.  On July 16, the New York Times reported that, “Some republicans say they do not worry much about being punished by their constituents for playing hardball with their votes on the debt limit and thus pushing the nation to the brink of default.  And besides, they doubt that the consequences of a default would be as dire as Mr. Obama and many economists say.”  Transposition: Some students say they do not worry much about being punished by their parents, classmates or school administrators for hardcore drinking, drug use and unprotected sex, and thus putting the safety of the campus at risk.  And besides, they doubt that the consequences of their behavior would be as dire as the Orientation staff and said administrators say.

It is, in fact, the case that a few first-year students each year do take this approach to their college experience.  In the final analysis, however, they are the rare exception.  Sadly, among U.S. House freshman members, such an attitude seems to have become the rule.  After all, while the misbehavior of college students can put university and college campuses, and perhaps neighboring communities, at some security risk, the misbehavior of the House of Representatives threatens to put the wellbeing of the entire nation, and perhaps the globe, at risk, and not merely in the sort term.  At a time when college students are frequently (and wrongly) accused of disinterest, disengagement, cynicism and apathy, it is truly pathetic that the freshman House members have managed to outdo any first-year college student in embodying the ethos of Animal House.