I should probably begin by saying I’m no activist, social reformist, progressive, do-gooder – whatever have you. Not in the operative sense of those words, anyway. I’m just a 21-year-old college kid largely consumed by the day-to-day trivialities of my own puny universe. But sometimes I think about the larger implications of what I’m doing with my time, specifically, where I am. And when I consider Northeastern University as a whole, I see a discrepancy. I figure a letter to the editor (read: campus) is as good a place as ever to put it into words.
As a student body, I have the impression that we are largely like-minded. We are kids with ambition; kids motivated by our own passions who thrive on independence and excel with opportunity. We don’t need a cookie-cutter curriculum, but more importantly, we don’t want one. We live in Boston because we’re restless and curious. We work co-ops and travel the globe because, even at our age, we’re capable of figuring out the world. We take our chances when we get them.
What bothers me, then, and has been bothering me more and more the longer I’ve been here, is that we – a body of entrepreneurs, innovators and go-getters – seem to be governed by an administration that runs our school less like a university of higher learning, and more like a PR agency.
I think about this as I walk under the obnoxious banners that line campus streets, waving pictures of beaming students looking happier than a prep school student at a salmon shorts sale. One of those gleaming models is a guy I used to work with. He is a schmuck. Our library is getting gimmickier by the year, like some kind of adult daycare with a space theme. But hey – prospective students love it. And as you ascend the hierarchy that is university administration, our alleged advocates get dodgier and dodgier until you reach the pinnacle of phoniness: our president. The dean of my college was surprised to have his authority questioned by students who sought to know more than what was “on the table” when the future of their degrees, professors and fields were at stake. Who are these people?
But arguably worse, I am seeing this underhandedness, this focus on fabricating the perfect façade instead of fostering a culture of authenticity that suits our students, having a trickle-down effect on organizations like SGA, who have taken to handling student affairs in a similarly aloof, passive aggressive way. I am tired of getting bad news via (insultingly contrived) emails.
It seems to me that the people with the most power at this school are the least concerned about those whom their decisions affect. I don’t mean to say anything disparaging about the character of these people, only that their actions are having the opposite effect of the “connected” and “engaged” university atmosphere they tout on our website. Instead, they’re creating a rift, one between student and administrator, academic and executive.
If it weren’t for my fellow students, in whom I believe, and my professors, in whom I trust, I wouldn’t be able to stomach this college.
–Emily Huizenga is a middler journalism major at Northeastern.
