By Jeff Rogers | Staff Columnist

Whenever I drive between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, I take the same route. Leaving campus, I head east on University Boulevard, following it through the intersections punctuating Alberta City, past the neon crescent of the Moon Winx Lodge, and over Highway 11 with the Alabama Southern Railroad to my right and Bama Salvage below me to the left. When I take the on-ramp to I-59 North, I cast a fond glance at the Big Rocks piled on hillside of Exit 79 and ride the interstate home.

Friends sometimes question the route, which admittedly takes longer to hit the interstate than other options, so I have justified my choice with dubious claims about directness and traffic. Yet, when the bridge to Alberta City was out and the detour on my route took twenty minutes to travel what should have taken five, I still found myself dutifully coasting through a neighborhood lined with “SLOW CHILDREN PLAYING” signs on the way to Exit 79. So why, really, do I insist on taking the long way home?

Well, I guess it’s just a tradition. I can remember taking Exit 79 to Tuscaloosa before I could sing the fight song. Back then I watched out the back-seat window of my dad’s mini-van. Now I use the time to gather my thoughts. It’s the longest-standing of my collegiate traditions, and the city couldn’t afford the amount of roadwork it would take to get me on a different route. Traditions die hard.

I mention this to illustrate the value I see in tradition and its role in giving meaning to a life filled with mundanities. But just last week, in one of our too-rare sit down conversations, a close friend pursuing his Ph.D. in history declared, “For as much as I love history, I hate tradition,” and he set me to thinking.  

Tradition is something we claim a surplus of in Tuscaloosa, perhaps justifiably so. The University is especially fertile ground for customs to be passed down from one graduating class to the next, but with only four years on campus, many students don’t have time to wholly consider the foundations or the implications of the traditions they propagate. I’m often impressed at our continual slackening of the criteria by which we determine what makes a new “tradition.” All it takes is a few years of shouting organized obscenities in Bryant-Denny Stadium loud enough for the entire country to hear, and now we’ve made a habit out of singing about some dude’s make out session in Tennessee.

But adding a few song lyrics is merely the type of inexcusable, asinine behavior expected – maybe even encouraged – of college students. At the heart of the matter is the question of what a given tradition upholds. At The University of Alabama, the answer to this question should be able to fall under the umbrella of the Capstone Creed, but too often our traditions fall far short of this. Instead, some traditions on this very campus promote exclusion, bigotry, groupthink and intimidation. Where do we draw the line between a time-honored tradition and a vestigial habit of values incompatible with ours today?

I won’t agree to my friend’s categorical statement regarding tradition, but I will just slightly amend it: I hate unexamined tradition. The tradition whose creation might have made sense in a past context but whose lasting influence is a stain on its adherents and hostile to others. The tradition that modernity has turned into a habit devoid of all value. These are the traditions that die the hardest, but also the ones that deserve the most scrutiny. This school year, whatever traditions you engage in, take time to think about where they come from and what they represent. Then ask yourself whether they deserve your precious time. I’ll be doing my thinking on the way to Exit 79.