According to one apparently well-informed upperclassman that I spoke to last week, there is little school spirit or student involvement here, and this is mostly because everyone’s in their room studying all the time.
I suppose one’s definition of “school spirit” is rather subjective. If going to hockey games and acting infantile qualifies, I would say there’s plenty. However, involvement does seem somewhat lacking. Sure, there are plenty of clubs and the like, but none of them seem to get much exposure. One can see signs everywhere, but nothing really seems to ever happen. Perhaps I just haven’t been looking in the right places.
This is a college, right? Isn’t this supposed to be where the greatest amount of intellectual and social activity goes on? Speaking of which, where are the political movements? Go a few miles northwest to CU-Boulder and you’d get eaten alive with radicals. I want radicalism! I want militant leftism! Bring on the protests, boycotts, marches and riots! Anything to liven this place up! Even if you don’t agree with the politics, it at least gives you something to laugh at, right?
This place feels dead to me. It is not uncommon for me to walk all the way across campus on a Friday night and needed only one hand to count the number of people I ran into. Where does everyone go?
Certainly not studying. I live on a “study floor” and the people on my floor are the most obnoxious group of jackasses I have ever come into contact with. No, no, I think everyone’s doing something far more noble than studying: they are getting absolutely smashed. Or baked. Or fried. Or whatever.
Why are they doing that? Because despite the prestigious reputation, this is still a college, and inebriation is still the number one sport among college kids. Why are they drinking? Perhaps because they, like me, don’t see where much of anything else happens, and since we have an embarrassingly lame student union that isn’t even really open on weekends, they just go to their rooms or leave campus.
Quite the vicious cycle we have going on here. Everyone’s drunk because they’re not involved, and nobody’s involved because they’re all drunk. We’re going to have to do something far more taxing than consuming Budweiser: take action, make some truly interesting things happen on campus. Stop recruiting quite so many kids that have few talents other than being rich and playing sports well. Recruit more kids that would actually be interested in intellectual activity.
