Conclusion

Abstract

Tom Wolfe begins his provocative portrait of postmodern college life in I Am Charlotte Simmons with a brief story about an unusual experiment with cats.¹ In the story scientists remove a portion of the cats’ brains that controls emotions in higher mammals. As a result, the cats “veer helplessly from one inappropriate affect to another.”² Their sexual urges, in particular, spin out of control. All this activity did not surprise the researchers. Instead, something else did. The normal cats watching this behavior suddenly changed. Wolfe writes, “Over a period of weeks they had become so thoroughly steeped in an environment of hypermanic sexual obsession that behavior induced surgically in the … cats had been induced in the controls without any intervention whatever.”³ According to Wolfe, scientists had discovered that “a strong social or ‘cultural’ atmosphere, even as abnormal as this one, could in time overwhelm the genetically determined responses of perfectly normal, healthy animals.”⁴