The More the Merrier

How UCU students can expand their devotion to campus life

Ivo Dimitrov and Klementina Ristovska

Tired of friends ignoring your birthday because of a few “incredibly important committee meetings”? Fed up with getting endless invites for all sorts of crazy events? Perhaps we have too many leisure committees that eat too much of our money on sketchy activities. Beep – wrong.

UCU’ers are nowhere near as involved as they should be. Especially with TribalCo now losing its committee status, we think campus is in a dire need of new, exciting and, of course, reasonable committees. Just throwing in some ideas.

MassageCo

What happened with the idea? Long days spent sitting on uncomfortable chairs in class, our room, Dining Hall – torture! MassageCo will work day and night to provide free, unlimited massage. Before you know it, Voltaire study area will turn into a wellness area, where you can enjoy a customized spa treatment while doing your Law readings. You will never again come unprepared to class.

GroceriesCo

Hate losing precious time to go shopping off campus? GroceriesCo for the win. Forget about the exhausting five-minute bike ride, or the horror of AH running out of your favorite juice. GroceriesCo will hire a special delivery service to do all the work for you. No need to pay the service – you’re a member. Just send them a text and within minutes a bag of your favorite chocolates and biscuits will be delivered to your door.

DietCo

DH food too expensive? DietCo will lobby that Sodexo replaces the current credit system with a calories-based system: no more than 100 per day. Board members will walk around DH confiscating deep-fried, fattening food (everything that’s served for dinner?), giving people an approving nod when having a single glass of water instead of a meal. Thin, healthy and with full wallets – what else to wish for?

Hey, we limited our suggestions to reasonable committees, but this MilitiaCo, advertised on posters around campus a few weeks ago, did sound like the ultimate excitement. Why not? Because there is no such thing as too much extracurricular involvement at UCU.

Winter-on-campus To-do List

ӹStaying on campus over winter break and needing some fresh ideas of unordinary stuff to do? For the first week it’s clear: get some proper sleep! But what about later? Don’t waste your precious free time to chick-flicks and drinking. Heed our advice: ӹ1. A unit on your own: make love to someone in the laundry room (the washing machine vibrates) ӹ2. Have a party in Voltaire quiet area ӹ3. Have some wine and romantic stargazing on the roof of W ӹ4. Bungee-jump from the tower ӹ5. Read the Book of Mormons ӹPS. Just kidding.

The Conformist in You

Marina Lazëri and Ivo Dimitrov “

People at UCU claim to be breaking down barriers and reaching out to others, but they really aren’t the people they think they are,” says linguistics professor Rosemary Orr. On this notion, we set off to investigate what campus life really is about. How intellectually alternative are we?

“UCU is definitely more alternative than high-schools and other universities. People are more approachable and, through getting to know them, you accept differences more easily.” says first-year Liana Dobrica.

It seems, the first impression the bubble gives is that of a place that embraces differences. Other first years testify to this. “There is a sense of being different, but you don’t need to express it strongly and individualistically, because everything is accepted,” says Laurence Herfs.

First-year Vincent Gerez finds the structuring of social life at UCU rather prominent. “After a while most of us behave in correspondence to certain norms. But I also think that the environment adapts to the kind of people that come here.”

But how different is difference in UCU’s small and socially structured community?

“After all, we do select students with a similar involved and curious character. We

UCSA/ASC Column

Is the UCSA Board Really Doing a Bad Job? Annerijn Vink

Let’s face it: Unity Day and Marathon Monday weren’t quite successful. With three teams participating in Unity Day and 31 people drinking beer on Marathon Tuesday, this cannot have been the result we were hoping for. Was it the UCSA Board’s fault?

Marathon Monday, based on a Boston tradition where the marathon provides a full day of drinking and fun, provoked quite some discussion. “It was a bit of a joke,” says UCSA Chair Noam Auerbach. “I didn’t think people would take it that far.” would like to admit people with a more different point of view than usual, but we cannot choose that over academic performance and involvement.” says philosophy professor Floris van der Burg.

Literally overnight, the Facebook event page was flooded with more than 40 comments from (former) UCSA members that expressed their disapproval of the event. They thought it was irresponsible and disrespectful towards teachers and College Hall, dubbing this “a new low point of the UCSA Board”.

An equal mindset, an equally structured life, and a homogeneous community - where did our self-proclaimed individuality go?

Tim Schoot Uiterkamp, class of 2011, disagrees that expressions of individuality disappear in UCU’s homogenous environment. “UCU social life tends towards the extremes. Perhaps people feel a greater need to emphasize difference because of living so closely together, or because of always being in the social context in which this identity makes sense.”

Celebrating difference we maybe are, but how alternative are the UCU students of today?

Roeland van Beck, class of 2011, who has continued living on campus, finds that students have changed. “In my year, there seemed to be more alternative people than there are currently. I’m speaking from a purely visual perspective here; I can’t think of anyone on campus with dreadlocks anymore.”

“I always found subcultures at UCU to be equally mainstream. Alternative is a paradoxical concept nowadays anyway,” says Sofia Afonasina, class of 2011.

This sentiment is shared to an extent by teachers and tutors. Orr notices the lack of student activism. “UCU doesn’t make you radical. A big part of the student body comes from a relatively wealthy background; or if they don’t, they are able to study here and are satisfied with their lives. They lack the anger that is needed to protest and that’s perfectly okay -students are here to learn and develop, not to fight against the establishment.”

How come though? Aren’t students on the frontlines of the revolution? International Relations professor Gerard van der Ree, ascribes this attitude to a generational difference. “In this day and age, there is a gap with times like the 1970s and ‘80s. Thirty years ago, individuality was a core part of identity and was expressed very strongly visually. Today this sensibility is gone; people have more tolerance for being in groups.”

Alternative or not, UCU students shouldn’t worry. Van der Ree says that at UCU “people develop a joint understanding of the role that they need to fulfill in order to be ready for adulthood, thus they practice for it in the same way.”

Maybe we have created the perfect alternative society - one in which alternativism is the mainstream, but also one that feels like the real world. And even if it’s an illusion - let us live it, it’s only three years anyways.

After this uproar, the Board changed the date to a Tuesday afternoon, so it would not interfere with academics. According to Noam, College Hall didn’t say anything about the event at all and understands that college life involves parties and alcohol. “People exaggerated the influence it would have on our representative role. It had no effect whatsoever.”

Some argue that if BarCo would have organized the event, most students would have been okay with it. Noam stresses that in the end, the responsibility lies with the Board, regardless of whether they organized it themselves or whether a committee organized it. “The only difference is a symbolical one,” he says. He emphasizes that the UCSA has a broad goal in taking care of all non-academic activities that are in students’ interest, varying from lectures and dance lessons to parties.

The most interesting argument, however, is probably that the Board thought that people would be responsible enough in deciding whether to join the event or not. “If you have an exam on Wednesday morning, no one is responsible for your partying on the Tuesday night before. You can’t blame the bartender that gave you the drink for your hangover the next day”. Indeed, those that didn’t have class on Monday afternoon could have joined without any worries. But does that mean that the UCSA Board should suggest, even stimulate, drinking in class?

The question boils down to the role of the UCSA Board: do we want them to fulfil all our different and sometimes very studenty wants, or do we want them to draw a line?

It is logical to blame the Board for the things that went wrong. It is easy to emphasize their mistakes. But let’s not forget that we, as UCSA members, have responsibility as well. We can complain about the “failure” of Unity Day and blame it on the Board, but most of us didn’t put any effort in making it work, either. And we can say Marathon Monday is disrespectful, but doesn’t it depend on ourselves whether it becomes an irresponsible event or not?