The great lesson that my years at Guilford have taught me is an old one: there is never enough time. The April of my senior year has made me hyper-aware of my frustrating inability to slow things down. The ever-approaching deadline, unmoved by unbelieving prayers or the possibility of friendships lost, moves inexorably closer no matter how hard I try to ignore it. People keep asking me if I’m scared. And I suppose I should be. A good friend of mine who graduated last year recently told me that the hardest thing to get used to is that no one, with the possible exception of blood kin, gives two shits about you. It isn’t that the general population is calculatedly cruel: it’s that they just don’t care. Indifference will be a marked change from the place I began to call home halfway through my freshman year. By my sophomore year undergrad seemed eternal. Life was an unending procession of dense theory, spontaneous romances, foolhardy escapades, political awakenings, and steadily accumulating vices. My ever-increasing radicalism proceeded apace, and I fell in love with Guilford.

Some days, if my homework load is light, I speculate upon the gouges my fingernails will leave in the walls of my apartment as I am forcibly evicted by Public Safety shortly after graduation. “Put me down, damn you! I want another year of drinking beer and reading Victorian literature!” Perhaps I can construct a blockade out of empty Egg-O cartons to fend them off. There are some things I won’t miss – the appallingly inept urban planning of Greensboro springs to mind. But I don’t want to leave the strange little group of fiercely opinionated, stubborn, argumentative, talented and charming friends I’ve made here. I’m ready to graduate chiefly because, without them, it wouldn’t be my Guilford anymore anyway. My friends, and college students in general, are remarkably similar to cheap wine in a number of ways, notably our alcohol content and our tendency to get sour as we age. If you get a group of seniors together, no matter the school, one of the topics that invariably arises is the declining state of higher education, exemplified by whatever institution they happen to inhabit. The time-honored senior mantra – “this school has gone downhill since I was a freshman” – is as redundant as it is clichéd. Of course the school has changed, and due to the vision certain higher level administrators have for Guilford, certain things have gotten worse. (I’m thinking predominately of the shift in admissions’ target demographic and the nasty trend of denying tenure to radical female professors.) But the noticeable conservatism of certain power players, and the tiresomely conventional aspects of the college they privilege, are just a part of the story. The collectively owned, fair trade, Greenleaf Coffee co-op, and the administration’s active new sustainability policy are both proof that the college is not too far gone. The fact that we have finally replaced Sodexo, with its contracts with the distinctly un-Quaker U.S. Marine Corps, is another testament to both student involvement and the much bandied about, and occasionally acted upon, core values. In short, don’t take the perennial rumbling of the graduating class too seriously. Guilford is the product of differing visions struggling to shape the institution. If you want the radical, heterodox aspects of Guilford to survive then don’t resign yourself to curmudgeonly complaining. Do something about it. As I write this article graduation is three weeks off, by the time you read it, merely two. Every time I talk to someone I love, every time I walk across the quad in the sun, every time I look out over the homey wastes of the Old Apartments, I hear a snatch of a favorite poem from English 200: “But at my back I always hear, time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” Then I feel a bit sad and resolve to enjoy what little I have left.