As a university with no football team, it’s easy to write off Northeastern as a lost cause for school spirit. We have the Beanpot hockey tournament, which is a ton of fun and probably our biggest display of school spirit, with our signature hockey chants and large student section. But school spirit goes beyond cheering for Northeastern during sports events — it’s a larger feeling of pride for our university and a feeling of community with other students.
But day-to-day, I’m used to hearing people express their frustration with Northeastern and how much they dislike attending it.
The school spirit deficit makes sense, considering the university’s roots as a commuter school and leadership’s response to the current political climate. But, at the end of the day, rejecting any school spirit by focusing solely on the negative aspects of Northeastern deeply impacts the sense of belonging that is possible for all students and only ends up hurting our university experience.
I’m not asking for us to start rah-rahing about the Huskies or attend every hockey game, but I think our lack of school spirit is worth reexamining on our own terms.
Compared with other universities, Northeastern’s undergraduate population is midsize, but it can feel so much larger than it actually is. We don’t have tailgates or long-standing traditions to bring the student population together the way some universities do. When we’re not seeing the same faces on campus, it’s hard to feel connected to the people we go to university with — they don’t feel any different than other students in the Boston area, so why would we feel a connection?
Community is essential for our well-being, and while it doesn’t necessarily need to come from our university, a sense of belonging at school has its benefits. A study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Teaching and Learning Lab reports that having a strong sense of belonging as a student can improve academic outcomes, increase continuing enrollment and benefit mental health overall.
Understanding the importance of community is the first step to developing a greater sense of school spirit at Northeastern. There’s plenty of resistance to claiming, “I’m proud to go to this school.” Northeastern continues to face backlash from students for its weak stance on free speech and bending to President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI demands, among other concerns. I’m not proud of the leadership of this university for a multitude of reasons — but they don’t make up the bulk of Northeastern — the students do.
The students I’ve met at Northeastern have shaped my experience more than anything else. While I don’t adore every student I’ve ever met here, there’s plenty that I do, and it’s enough to make me appreciate Northeastern as a whole and want to build a stronger community here.
School spirit goes beyond pep rallies and old traditions. If we don’t have any sense of pride or belonging at Northeastern, we hinder the progress we can make as a student body. As we know, organized group protest is more effective than individual work when it comes to political change — there are plenty of political student groups on campus that could use more student voices and support. So many students are frustrated with Northeastern leadership, but if we don’t feel like a community, we can’t work together like one.
The second we start hating something and dismissing it as not worth our energy, we’re calling it a lost cause. Northeastern is not a lost cause, if only because of the students that belong to it; our university should be better because we deserve it to be. If that’s what’s fueling my pride in attending here, then so be it.
It’s not a traditional approach to school spirit, but Northeastern isn’t known for being a traditional school.
This past semester, I attended the No Limits Dance Crew show in Blackman Auditorium to see some of my friends perform. No Limits is one of the many student performance groups on campus, and its end-of-semester showcase features more than a hundred dancers of all experience levels. While watching people I vaguely knew from classes or other clubs appear in the show, I felt a sense of familiarity and community that can be lacking on campus.
Near the end of the semester, so many student groups put on performances. Make time to go see them. Or, if the idea of watching a performance isn’t appealing to you, go see one of the many Northeastern sports teams play. It doesn’t need to be hockey.
There are no guidelines for what school spirit should look like at Northeastern, which means it can look like anything, as long as you’re engaging with the community on campus. Supporting our fellow students doing what they love can be really enjoyable, and it builds up that sense of familiarity that makes campus feel a little bit smaller.
As silly as it seems, the lack of school spirit can have a serious impact on our college experience socially, academically and politically. I want to go to a school I’m proud of, with students I feel I have a sense of community with — there’s no reason Northeastern can’t be that for everyone.
Nora Harr is a second-year English and computer science combined major. She can be reached at [email protected].
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