A senior thesis is like a root canal; no one thinks about it until they need one for themselves. Ben Crumm, 21-year-old honors student at Eastern Michigan University is different. He knew he wanted to do a thesis on his cross-country trip around America before he wanted to go to EMU.
When Crumm was touring the College of Wooster while in high school, he learned seniors had to do a senior project. He chose to complete his senior thesis at EMU instead because he was awarded the Presidential Scholarship and his high school GPA was .05, too low for one of the College of Wooster scholarships he wanted.
Crumm’s senior thesis investigates why people love America despite all of the things wrong with it. Crumm followed the footsteps of his father David when David traveled across America in 1976 writing for the Detroit Free Press.
“If pretty much all Americans are worried about their money and their life, why do they love the country so much? What I found was: opportunity. There’s always a good future people can see,” Crumm said.
The 40-day father and son trip started on July 31, 2010. They traveled by car, writing articles for the Detroit Free Press and Read the Spirit Magazine. Ben Crumm, now back at EMU, is in the early stage of writing his thesis. He plans to use the interviews he collected to chronicle American life and record what people thought and felt in 2010.
According to Charles Leadbeater, author of “The Pro-Am Revolution,” those living in the 21st century are in the middle of a Professional-Amateur Revolution, where the distinctions between an amateur and a professional are blurring. According to Leadbeater, amateur professionalism occurs in populations that have more leisure time and live longer than other populations.
“Opportunity has just exploded,” Crumm said. “There are more ways to do whatever you want. Because of the Internet, you have amateurs who are performing at professional levels, but are simply putting their work online because it’s free. Ten, 50, 100 years ago, you were much more limited because there were simply less options. The problem with that is it takes a lot more to find your niche.”
This summer, Crumm arrived at a Seattle changed by Boeing and Microsoft corporations. When his father visited Seattle in 1976, it was because it was cheap.
“It’s just sort of an interesting juxtaposition that my two friends were out there with these wonderful internships, even though a lot of America is talking about how the economy’s bad,” Crumm said.
It was the first time Crumm traveled west of the Mississippi River. He was amazed how big and diverse it is. When Crumm was in the United Kingdom, he traveled across England and Scotland in hours. It took days for Crumm to travel across America.
“You’re going through Montana, and you feel it’s a foreign place with these grasslands and mountains,” Crumm said. “You can stop in a city though, and walk into a Target, and it’s the same music playing on the radio, the same products sold and the same layout of the store. It’s interesting how America has adapted to being so big, by tying itself together with corporations.”
At first glance, Tangier Island is an outlier, a pocket of America unaffected by change and corporations. Tangier Island is an isolated place in Virginia, with a population of roughly 600 people. Some of its inhabitants have ancestors who lived on Tangier Island pre-Revolutionary War.
“People on the island would want you to think it’s an outlier, but an ESPN commercial was filmed there, they now have high-speed internet, and the island is disappearing about 35 acres a year,” Crumm said. “When we were there, there was a conflict on the island because a Jewish family was offended because they included a cross when they repainted the water tower.”
According to the Gale Encyclopedia of Public Health, Tangier’s Disease is a rare recessive condition in which individuals have a mutation in the ABCA1 gene. This causes an individual’s tonsils to turn orange or yellow and become extremely enlarged. Tangier Island’s geographical isolation and low genetic diversity helped geneticists discover the gene.
Crumm’s father traveled there in 1976 to report on Class Meetings, a Methodist practice dating back 300 years. It is like a city council meeting, but with prayer afterwards. Methodists on Tangier Island still practice it.
“The problem with interviewing people about history is they’ll start to see themselves how they fit into history and then they describe themselves however they want to be remembered,” Crumm said.
After finishing his senior thesis, Crumm plans on going to graduate school and eventually becoming a history professor.
“Maybe someday, when I’m an adult with a kid, I can go take my son around the country and see how it’s different,” Crumm said.