It is that time of year when, after all honors and awards have been handed out and graduation looms, the pages of The Crimson White are graced with senior columns. These sappy and generally inane contributions allow senior students a chance to (publicly) reflect on their college experience, and usually include some vague and half-hearted call to action. This year’s columnists seem to be following this general template but have managed to climb to new levels of meaninglessness and hypocrisy.
In Mr. Fowler’s ode to himself, he treats the reader to various anecdotes involving his fraternity and his calling to enter campus politics, before saying something quite profound. He describes an epiphany he had, when all of a sudden he was struck by an inclination to speak to human beings who were outside of his usual circle of privilege. “I began to interact with new groups of students,” he reveals, “independents, minority students, international students, LGBTQ students and so many others.” Incredible! What’s more, he was “shocked” to make the earth-shattering discovery that these “new” people were not completely unlike him. The very thought of it! Congratulations, James. Congratulations for taking 22 years to discover something many of us grasp intuitively as children.
This social pioneer then has the audacity to challenge the reader, asking us “When was the last time you talked to someone of another race?” This is a normal occurrence for many of us, but in any case I am glad you finally realized this, and am even happier that you shared your weighty insights with us.
And though you are “thankful” for the Pasadena-gate episode, forgive us, the students whose resources were wasted, if we do not share your sentiments. Ms. McCrummen’s column takes a different turn as she compares her time at th University to “King Arthur’s Camelot—one brief shining moment when wrongs were righted, when legendary personalities led with brilliant insight. In the last few years, leaders that I am honored to call friends have acted in their own circles of influence with wisdom and courage.” This pathetic attempt to impose a grand narrative onto one’s own experiences, to derive some higher meaning and purpose where one does not exist, reveals an unbounded narcissism, one that prevents the writer from seeing herself and her friends as anything less than legends.
This inability to conceive of a world outside of oneself is central to my point. How are we less legendary folk to react to such a column? We should respond by saying, essentially: Easy for you to say. It is easy for you to hold out your “ideals like lanterns.” You too, Mr. Fowler and Ms. McCrummen, who have been at or near the center of attention since you arrived as freshmen; it must be easy to hold out your metaphorical lantern knowing that people are listening and that people care. For those of us who don’t have a Fellows mentor, greek brothers and sisters, access to university officials, or a position within SGA, our arms grow tired, and when we realize that no one is paying attention to our lanterns, please excuse us if we set them down. These lame calls for “sacrificial service” ring hollow when formed by the mouths of those directly implicated in last year’s SGA scandal. It takes a near schizophrenic mind to have participated in such corruption and then to turn around and issue a call for “service, honor and integrity.” Accept our apologies, Ms. McCrummen, but for most of us, college is not about chasing “the very image of what we dream the world to be;” it is about survival. Ours is not a fairytale like yours. It is working a job or two, going into debt and ultimate anonymity. This is not a defense of student apathy, but an attempt to dispel the illusion of a continuing story of progress, in which Mr. Fowler and Ms. McCrummen fancy themselves as major characters. While it is true that an independent now fills the third highest position in the SGA, which is operating under a new constitution, this pales in comparison to certain facts which I, myself find more relevant: the glorification in bronze of football icons while real achievement goes unnoticed, a campus infrastructure that can no longer support the growing student body, rising tuition costs, students being fleeced by the University’s parking racket and an administration that is unsure how to respond to a mounting number of student suicides.
A word to the wise: disregard the fatuous drivel that will surely appear over the next week and a half in this paper. Feel no pressure to pursue some false sense of community—for there is no such thing as a community that encompasses the entirety of the student body. We students represent a group of divergent and often competing interests, so pursue your own interests and passions. Do not fall prey to loving some abstraction known as The University of Alabama. How would one even do this? How does one love a university? Love your friends, love your professors, love your studies, but not some illusory concept of UA. Don’t love it, because an institution cannot love you back. View this place as a means, not an end. Use the University to get where you need to go. Use it as unashamedly as it uses you, survive and leave it behind.
Evan Ward is a junior majoring in history.
