While spending precious minutes of my life on hold with Information Technology this past Wednesday, the automated system serenaded me with the beautiful sounds of our alma mater. It occurred to me then that the alma mater still stirs an unquestionable pride in our University.
This realization was strange to me because I have been at odds for most of my time here with the bureaucracy and apathy that infests our campus. When Hurricane Katrina forced me back home to Baton Rouge, I thought the University would be a temporary arrangement for me. Two years later, after going back to Loyola and returning here after my program was cut, the University has proven to be a more permanent fixture in my life than I originally thought.
I believed when I started I could change the minor problems I saw here through the two years I was involved with Student Government. I loved my work, and I felt we were making an impact and fighting for the “ordinary student.”
But with the First Year Residency Requirement, Easy Streets and a Flagship Agenda, which looks nice but does nothing to truly promote the students of this University, it’s very easy to become disheartened.
I have seen administrators make extremely poor decisions, be self-serving, rob students of their civil rights and act in complete disregard for any sense of responsibility to those they were hired to help. How, then, can I still feel such an immense pride when I hear the alma mater when I have seen with my own eyes so many wrongs committed?
It is for the same reason I still sing the national anthem. I disagree with almost everything President Bush has done while in office these seven long years, yet still I have pride in my country.
Likewise, I rarely agree with the reasoning or decisions of our University’s “commander in chief,” Chancellor Sean O’Keefe. The University likes to throw around its vague interpretations of the facts about our “peer institutions.” You can often see through the smoke, however, when you investigate the so-called facts closely.
If more students did their own research on the issues instead of blindly believing what the administrators say, we could make an enormous impact on the future of our University. Apathy is what corrupt administrators and their misled student leaders rely on and eliminating the student body’s apathy could bring about healthy change.
As with everything, there is good and evil. Not every administrator or student leader is corrupt, and there are fine examples of both on this campus. I think the unsung hero of this campus is the staff that truly runs this University. We don’t realize how much we rely on the employees of Chartwells and the Facility Service workers. As part of my other job, I regularly deliver mail on campus. More often than not, when I walk into one of the higher-up’s offices, no one addresses me. On the other hand, I cannot tell you the last time I didn’t exchange at least a friendly hello with a maintenance worker. These workers are essential to campus life, and they are barely acknowledged by many of us. It’s unfortunate that some people still haven’t learned their basic manners by the time they enter college, but then again, the administration typically doesn’t give us a great example.
There are many things I wish I could change about our University, but one person cannot do it by herself. It will take the hard work of many dedicated individuals, and I’m not talking about Student Government. It will take more than just student leaders and student media to bring about change. If you start learning about these issues now and different ways to change the problems that plague the University, it will be easier to become involved in “the real world” because oftentimes these problems are very similar. We cannot be content with allowing our administrators to take care of issues for us. They are not our parents, and their intentions are rarely as pure.
Maybe we should all take a cue from Les Miles and the “no nonsense” attitude he had with the press this past weekend. If we use this attitude, we could see the success our football team is having here on our campus in academics and student life. Until then, I’ll still sing the alma mater with pride, hoping an ethics revolution will soon take place.
—-Contact Laura Bratcher at [email protected]