What do you think is the consciousness of the university?
I didn't have a very good answer, but I tried my best. My response was something to the effect that we don't really have any single consciousness; nothing really unites all students and gives them something insightful to think or say to one another in the absence of other shared experience. Sure, the campus is not lacking in other points of connection between students; groups of friends share experience and interests all over the place. My point was that there isn't anything that unites all of us under one umbrella.
I felt like I did a pretty good job of ensuring that I was nonabrasive and easy to agree at least partially with, but I was evidently wrong. The girl sitting next to me raised her hand and disagreed completely, saying something like:
I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of school spirit and love for the university. People who come here love it even after they've been gone for a long time. I was hiking in Kansas when we passed an older couple in orange and blue clothes, and I said to them "I-L-L?" They responded "I-N-I!!" I feel like people here love this school.
Others in the class apparently agreed with her, because some jumped in with similar sentiments:
I mean, some people love this school enough to paint a rock on the quad with the school logo, that's gotta count for something.
I remember I was walking in Champaign and saw a house with a cooler they had painted orange and blue. I feel like that's pretty loyal.
I didn't say anything else to make my disagreement known, but I would have had I not been trying really hard to limit how rude I was to others in my classes—several friends had been teasing me for being an asshole. This sentiment, that chanting "I-L-L" or wearing orange and blue qualifies as a consciousness, is entirely reprehensible to me. "I-L-L" is a mindless chant and an orange block "I" on a field of blue is a logo to that sells t-shirts; they are not on the same level as a real, emotional connection between human beings.
The argument reminded me of a scene in Super Size Me where—if memory serves—Morgan Spurlock goes to places in Washington D.C. like the Capitol Building and the White House where people with an interest in politics and American history might congregate and asks the people he sees there to recite passages from the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or the First Amendment or even the Pledge of Allegiance. The film contains no scenes of people getting any of these correct. But, when asked to recite the McDonald's jingle for the Big Mac, people get enthusiastic about being able to recite the jingle—which I haven't heard on an ad, come to think of it, since childhood—perfectly.
I find the prospect of our university's students accepting a set of mindless rhetoric and idolatry on the level with an old Big Mac jingle as a shared consciousness incredibly depressing. I've spent the last few weeks desperately searching for a more significant connection between students than our colors and chants, and have been not at all successful, however.
Are we lowering our standards as a society, or have human connections always been this mindless?
