Newsfeed
Printer-Friendly ModeMany hold wayward perception of what college should be about
August 31, 2009 —
My brother loves to tell a story about a bus ride he took one night in Lansing. One the first day of classes at Michigan State University, a girl boarded the bus right outside of Sparrow Hospital.
With her face buried in her hands, her mood did not match her flashy dance-club attire. Smudges of tear-eroded makeup could be seen even at the outer edges of her face not covered by her hands, and an emergency room bracelet with the words “stomach pump” written on the outside—plus the smell of vomit— revealed the story behind her current disastrous form. My brother calls it “The Bus Ride of Shame.” With the first weekend of school behind us, there are likely many students here who don’t find this story funny anymore.
Despite the casualties—all the futures gored over the pikes of DUIs, MIPs and NTAs—students arrive each August and pit themselves against law officials in a duel of wits and resources that only General Custer would feel confident about. Why? Why is it that such a massive percentage of college students, given their new freedom from the oppressive hands of their parents, feel compelled to rage against the next authority that presents itself?
There is a tradition in American universities: a tradition that costs young people like me money, respect, opportunity, and, far too often, lives. I haven’t lived a sheltered life, exploring and having just about every kind of fun there is to be had on this small planet, and I have yet to encounter any festivity so packed with excitement and satisfaction that it was worth risking those things.
Senior year in high school, we looked back and laughed at how stupid we were as freshman. We had come in, with our new wardrobe and our new haircut, and made idiots of ourselves trying to do what we thought high schoolers were supposed to do.
And we repeat that mistake when we came to college. The summer before college we refine our look to what we think a college student should look like. Tanning. Thongs. Muscle milk. Piercings. Dyed hair. Clothes that don’t fit right in so many ways. Obscene amounts of hair-gel. Boots with the fur while de-furring our bodies (and enduring the pain of waxing or the burn of shaving to do so.) We do all of these things and cry out like Mel Gibson, “Freedom!”
I support self-expression and independence, but let us not call our social, pressure-induced idiocy liberated expression. I see the girl who starts wearing clothes that make her uncomfortable and taking shots because that’s what she thinks all the other college students expect her to do, and that doesn’t look like a free person.
I see a kid who spends hours each week shaving his whole body and hours more trying desperately to fornicate with any willing female because that’s what guys do, and that doesn’t look like a free person to me. The fact is, lots of the people finding themselves in room full of drunken kids and sober police have never done anything to get busted before. Why start now? Because that’s what college is, right? College is about sex and parties: wild nights and memories that live on only in the pictures we took when we were too drunk to actually remember.
As soon as we stop telling ourselves how fun all that is, we will all start to realize that it isn’t that fun. We will realize that it isn’t what college is all about. And hopefully, the freshman arriving from the social chaos that is high school will stop acting like idiots because that’s what they think they are supposed to be doing. People we love have died because of the misconceptions we create about what college should be.
For the sake of preventing that, and to save girls everywhere the embarrassment and emotional damage of having to take the Bus Ride of Shame (literally or figuratively), feel free to acknowledge that college isn’t about that at all. And if you can’t, at least admit that you aren’t an expressive, independent, free-spirited rebel, but a young person who is more afraid of social rejection than you are of the police.