I have spent the last four years of my life at this university trying to figure out what’s been driving undergraduates’ animosity toward our administration.

Certainly, over the years we’ve had our battles: the “Fight for Five” debate, the print quota debacle, and Vice President of Government Relations and Community Affairs Jeff Doggett’s patrols on Mission Hill, to name a few. And believe me, I had my stance on each of them.
But up until this past week, I was unable to identify the common thread between all of these issues. I couldn’t find a tangible piece of evidence for why such rampant dissatisfaction perpetually exists on our campus. All of that confusion was cleared up, though, when I clicked on the “Excellence by Design” link in President Aoun’s e-mail announcement titled “The State of Our University.”

The Web site couldn’t have spelled it out any better — or worse, depending on how one looks at it. There, in plain sight, I saw a direct comparison being made between our newest freshmen class and the one that entered four years ago. More specifically, my class.
The first bullet point: “Eighty-five freshmen are National Merit Finalists; in 2006, there were three.” Second bullet point: “Fifty percent of freshmen graduated in the top 10 percent of their class, an increase of 12 percentage points from 2006.” And to top it all off, a plotted graph showing a seventy-eight point increase in the mean SAT scores of the last four years’ freshman classes.

Well, now I have only three words to say to these “selling points” above: WE’RE. STILL. HERE. Yes, that’s right, the freshman class of 2006 is still attending your precious institution of progression. Maybe you were so caught up in this new focus on four-year programs that you forgot an emphasis on five years did exist in the past, and the students who were initially attracted to it are now sitting on your campus, in your facilities, looking at this condescending, narrow-minded PDF. We all knew this school had become obsessed with SAT scores and rankings, but using an active class’s shortcomings as a metric for your current success is a new low.

I find this especially ironic considering the freshman class of 2006 is the class that is currently tasked with perpetuating this university’s only meaningful ranking: the No. 1 university for job placements. With that, I have one last thing to say to those who sat in the room and contributed to the document released Oct. 13. You list all these figures showing increased alumni donations and participation; however, we’re ranked 121st in university endowments nationwide.

We currently sit behind University of Tulsa and Pomona College, to name a couple. Ever wonder why that is? Your focus is all about the numbers, the scholarships, the grants and the money. It’s never about the fun, the pride and the experience. And while we appreciate the free Chartwell’s cheeseburger in the library quad four times a year, and, yes, it’s nice to have some Colonial Athletic Association awards in the bag, maybe it’s time to look into the intangibles, the memories we leave here with. In the mean time, good luck getting donations from the class of 2011.

– Wes Falik is a senior business major.