大学精神: 物质与人

College spirit is immaterial: it’s the people who matter

Courtyard of Branford College, Yale University

By Jason Wu

Spring 2008, Calliope, The literary magazine of Yale’s Branford College 

Our group of randomly selected students is better than yours.

 Saybrook College T-Shirt

 

Those of us who attend may chant “Such our Tower” at sporting events, and we may tell every tourist, parent, and prefrosh that we encounter what Robert Frost said about our courtyard, but pressed, most Branfordians will concede to an absence of college spirit-at least in other Branfordians. We have been in the intramural cellar for most of our institutional memory. Indeed, when a recent Master’s Tea guest asked Master Smith what made our college distinctive, he could only say that we were bad at sports.

 

If we are to believe Master Smith, two things distinguish Branford: apathy and how generally undistinguished it is otherwise. Apathy shouldn’t be a problem. People aren’t apathetic because there’s something wrong with them; they’re apathetic because they’re generally content. You can see this in history: the times when populations are the most politically energized usually coincide with great crisis or ideological struggles.Apathy is associated with happier times-periods of peace, security,relative satisfaction. I grant that there are times when apathy is forced on a population-times when it is the result of a barrier to entry or a sense of powerlessness-but that is not the case with Branford. If we had bigger grievances than an over-the-hill Spring Fling lineup, we would care more.

 

So what about the question of uniqueness? Isn’t that a problem? Yale loves to brag about its residential college system, after all. The admission department arms every prospective freshman with knowledge of the number of  bells in Harkness Tower and of the history of the Tyng Cup; the AYA tracks alumni by college until they croak.Yale cares about our colleges. Shouldn’t we care about what makes our particular college better than, or at least distinct from,the others?

 

I don’t think we should. Character displacement, an idea familiar to biologists, can tell us something about this. Character displacement holds that if two populations of similar species (say, Branfordians and J. Edwardians) occupy a common territory, they will diverge in their characteristics where both are present. This is thought to be a way of filling different niches and avoiding the competitive exclusion principle (that over time, if two populations are competing for the same niches, one will thrive and the other will go extinct). Our version of this is through rivalry (BFA!). A similar phenomenon occurred in England after the Reformation, when the Protestants and the Catholics actually held rather similar views. We define ourselves by who are not; the closer we are in reality to our peers, the more we accentuate any perceived differences. If our college’s character depends on these manufactured rivalries, we ought to dismiss the whole question of distinction and just move on.

 

All of this is not to say that our community holds no value. It does. But our attention should not be focused on some search for Branfordian exceptionality. Such a search tends to generate a set of arbitrary differences on silly grounds. Instead our question should be what our community means for us. This is a question that must answer for ourselves. For me, it is hard to explain. One night last summer, I was sitting in a bookstore in St. Louis when a man in a sweatshirt interrupted my phone call up seeing “If you will it, it is no dream” on the back of my Branford T-shirt. He showed me his class ring-I think he was class of ’93- and walked on. And this past semester I discovered the essay “College Pressures” in the Norton Reader, an uncommonly sensitive account of the anxieties of our generation’s career search, before also discovering it was written by William Zinsser, a past master of Branford (It contains excerpts from student requests for Dean’s excuses; you should read it). Being a Branford student is kind of like being the distant relative of a famous person-you’re made self-conscious from time to time.

 

Nicias once told the Athenians that it was the people, not the ships or the towers, that constituted the city. The polis was its citizens. So it is with Branford. Neutralizing the apathy problem and eliminating the question of college character do nothing to diminish the value Branford retains as a community, a value created by its people. To understand that value it is necessary to look at individual cases, and I believe my own experience is fairly typical. Branford comes into my life the same vital way it comes into most student’s lives-it’s where I live,it’s where my friends are, it’s where I go to recover from the eternal vicissitudes of life at this age. Branford, however undistinguished it may be, is a safe haven at a time when the weather is changing.

 

Editor’s note on “Views on Branford: College Pride or College Prejudice.”

 

The idea of Branford spirit has been on our minds for some time. To exploreit further, we conceived of a feature that would open a discussion onthe topic, to get Branfordians to think seriously about the purpose ofa residential college community. Sophomore Jason Wu agreed to writesuch a feature, and the result is indeed thought provoking. However,thoughts by nature are passive, while dialogue actively inspires otherdialogue. In discussing Jason’s piece, it became clear that even withinthe small Calliope staff there are several diverse perspectives on thesubject, and it began seem less and less appropriate to publish theviews of only one Branfordian. Within such a limited time frame, itwould have been impossible to find someone else to write the other halfof the feature. While the Calliope editors believe that, it general, topublish our own work would compromise the integrity of the magazine, inthis case, the opportunity to open a conversation about college prideseemed too valuable to ignore. The article written by Paul Ramirez, aCalliope editor, represents a second Branford voice, not the opinionsof the Calliope staff. We hope its presence fulfills the need forbalanced and open discourse within the magazine and catalyzes a similardiscussion within the larger Branford community.


Posted 星期日, 06/27/2010 - 06:04 by Fishville at www.tongjiyiren.com ([e-mail])