The Campus in the Mirror – An Unofficial MJ Tribute

September of my freshman year, exhausted by the estrogen on my all girls floor, I joined the Men’s Novice Crew team as a coxswain. By March, one race and two seasons later, the entire team had quit. It was my introduction to Connecticut College extracurricular life.

Last week, the Larrabee housefellow hosted a dessert and dialogue about women’s body image and supplied a giant sized bucket of truffle mix meant for about 30 people. Two guys and one girl attended, the girl just for the truffles.

Bands perform here for our Friday Nights Live, some used to opening for acts as famous as Broken Social Scene, for twelve people sitting on couches along the periphery of Cro’s nest.

There’s no denying that these facts are extremely disappointing. They are also situations that give us an outlet to assert generalizations and blame on our own student body. But doing so confuses symptoms with causes – there are larger, more specific issues that lead to each of these dispiriting cases, and in order to even begin to fix them, we need focusing goals instead of shaming categorizations.

When we make assertions about our school, everything becomes evidence to our viewpoint. Sociologists call it the looking-glass self: A person’s self-concept is a reflection of how others perceive them. More simply put, the way you see me has a very strong influence in how I see myself. This makes using any broad-based term dangerous, whether it be as negative as “apathetic”, or as positive as “well-rounded”.

Calling our student body apathetic will only perpetuate the apathy; calling our student body well-rounded will reinforce the well-roundedness, but the term’s vagueness, its lack of direction, may detract from other qualities we want to be. In the end, any label is a generalization that can be proven by pointing to a handful of students, but no label is big enough to include us all. In falling back on generalizations about who we are, we’re first, implying that there are things we’re not. Second, we’re placing blame on people instead of looking at the effectiveness of the systems we have in place. And third, we’re cutting off forward momentum towards changing our habits and attitudes as a whole.

Who are these students: an art major with an emphasis in sculpture, who spends her days in Cummings casting iron and her nights making lattes at the Blue Camel Café. An American Studies major who works at Coffee Grounds, sings at Open Mic’s, and is on the board of directors at WCNI. A varsity soccer player majoring in Environmental Chemistry who spent last summer doing Chemistry research on campus. Some of these students are well-rounded, but others are specifically directed. They are certainly not apathetic, and they should all be valued for being some of many things that Connecticut College is.

So if we as a school are a reflection of how others label or perceive us, then the most effective way to induce positive forward momentum is to decide consciously how we want to be seen. Instead of labeling and pigeonholing ourselves in who we are at present, we can use this as a basis to work towards a new goal, students and administration together.

Currently, how we want to be seen is controlled primarily through the offices of Admissions and College Relations. Their job is to present our school in a specific way. From my experience as a student working in both offices, I can tell you that there is a disconnect between students and promotional staff: there has yet to be a strong enough, effective enough dialogue between what students find important about our school and what these image-makers have learned are good selling points for our school.

Take, for example, the Connecticut College Viewbox Cards, a box of 31 shiny, bright, expensively-packaged cards made by an outside consulting company in accordance with College Relations and Admissions. They are given to prospective students before tours and interviews. According to these cards, the following are the ten things to love about Connecticut College:

“1. The View
2. Language Tables at Lunch
3. Camel Cookies and Milk
4. The Chapel at Dusk
5. Location, Location, Location
6. Free Music Lessons
7. Many opportunities to study in extraordinary and faraway places
8. Sprout!
9. MOBROC
10. Camelympics!”

The emphasis of the rest of these cards is on the things we have: 28 Varsity Teams. 50+ majors. 750 Acres of Arboretum. State of the art facilities. Ion accelerators. Never mind that Camel Cookies aren’t that good, and that people rarely speak languages in the Knowlton Dining Hall. Never mind that Camelympics doesn’t go through the night anymore, and that Free Music Lessons also involve credits and coursework. It’s okay that some of these systems don’t run effectively, because that’s the nature of any working system: it has flaws. It’s not that the opportunities our school provides are not valuable and beneficial–because they are. It’s that the wrong systems are emphasized.

Study Abroad opportunities and electron microscopes are not things that make our school unique from Bates, Colby, Hamilton, and Skidmore. What about the fact that we’ve set up a system of bike sharing? That students have self-designed majors like Bioinformatics and Social Justice? That private companies have been completely pushed out of our dances, to be replaced by student DJs with laptops and Logic Pro? Should how we want to be seen be based on the cool things Connecticut College gives us, or the ways in which Connecticut College Students take roles in the opportunities they’re given?

If we promote ourselves as a school of students who actively do aim to take advantage of these things, then perhaps that apparent “apathy” will dwindle. Maybe we can put our Looking Glass Self to good use.

This is how I want us to be seen: diverse, intellectually engaged, creative thinkers.

What about you?