The other day I took an online survey entitled “Residence Environment Assessment.” The questions ranged from in what negative ways alcohol had affected me – disregarding the positive benefits of “social lubrication” – to how the University has altered my perceptions and abilities. After long digressions in the “explain here” boxes, I felt I was not quite finished. “Never,” “Sometimes” and “All the time” don’t really sum up our feelings. I’d like to present mine, and I encourage all to write to the Department of Residential Life or The Daily Reveille with theirs.
Diversity on campus, whether race or income level or religion, makes little difference to students. In this globalized and media-driven world even the most steadfastly fundamentalist, backwood Southerner has heard and probably seen a Muslim, a homosexual and an Asian. Brag on the brochures if you will, University, but it has not helped me with my studies. Minority enrollment is a wonderful thing, and good-natured people everywhere will be happy that those who have been persecuted historically and discriminated against are bettering themselves with a college education, but it does not change the quality of education here.
You continue to meddle with the social cleavages students wish to have. You want to end drunken driving, unprotected sex and low class attendance, but ridding students of cheaper alcohol is a nearsighted response. You treat every drinker like he’s “killing a flatty of Natty” every night. Other alternatives, a student-run taxi system back to campus, more bars near campus or – God forbid – a bar on campus, have escaped attention. Perhaps if classes required more than a quick glance over a textbook before a test, students would be less enthusiastic about getting DWIs on a Tuesday night.
University, you throw the word “Flagship” around but have yet to show the students what it means. How do dorm residency requirements improve the quality of education on campus? How does it improve campus life by forcing more freshmen to be bored on campus? Or is it “academically beneficial” simply because they will be more bored?
We sit in rotting classrooms, dear University, with broken clocks affixed to walls covered in advertisements for guitar and drum lessons behind desks covered with graffiti embarrassed you will actual pay people to create silly ad campaigns and sillier mascots in hopes of attracting future students to this drab learning environment for services unpresentably rendered.
Students have to walk from the Mississippi River in the oppressive Gulf heat to nearly as hot classrooms, and you wonder why we students don’t want to “hang out” on campus? Most of your new buildings, including that infernal Middleton Library, look like a brochure for Johnson’s Great Society program not a brochure for higher education. You’ll spend millions picked out of the pockets of current students for a future Union they’ll never use, and yet the best things to come out of the Programming Council are monthly poster sales and free movies that were in theaters a year ago.
We’re bombarded with rally after petition from flags to bus drivers to custodians to mascots, and nothing has changed except the rabidity for change has cooled into resentment. University, improve.
 
Lake is a history senior. Contact
him at [email protected]