Behold the mighty arms of the Authority

The more I read about my alma mater today, the angrier I became.

The wire hummed today with the news that Queen's principal has suspended Homecoming festivities for the next two years. Why?

Well, let's see. I'll try to describe Queen's Homecoming weekend to those of you who have never been. It used to go something like this:
Friday afternoon: Begin drinking at Clark Hall as soon as possible (until the University closed it down. Hmm.) with the objective of getting as much free beer as possible (students) or getting young attractive students as drunk as possible (alumni). Repeat at Queen's Pub and Alfie's.
Eat pizza or poutine, stumble around drunk to various house parties, and eventually find someplace to sleep.
Saturday: Wake up hungover. Shower, eat greasy leftover pizza, and don representative faculty gear to attend football game. For engineers, this means kilts and purple skin, most other faculties their overalls, face paint, and jackets. Start drinking.
Eat an apple from the store on the way to the stadium. If you have any money when you get there, buy more booze or maybe even a Beavertail. Yell at the alumni across the field, or yell old cheers and jeers from the stands if you're an alumni. Get mooned by the Queen's Band, watch cheerleaders strip, pay no attention to the football game except to hurl the occasional insult at the opponents.
Watch alumni attempt to crowd surf at halftime. Rush the field for a giant Oil Thigh (singing the school song and dancing) before heading somewhere else to drink.
Saturday night/Sunday morning: It's been said the alumni have a lovely dinner to attend, but I've never been. We usually found a house party or gave one, drank way too much, and stumbled home. I remember giant keggers at the Mansion, and my former housemate's soirees at Beaver Lodge on Aberdeen Street, which have apparently now grown to monstrous proportions.

Anyway, I digress. The main point is that too many people show up for the party, get drunk, and wreak havoc, so the Principal cancelled the party. Knowing how wily and stubborn students can be, and that most of the attendants aren't alumni (or are ones who still have friends there) I'm predicting that a large party will still occur next fall on campus, regardless of the lack of formal campus events.

The idea of cancelling an event to change behaviour irked me for a moment, but not for long. There's even a facebook group encouraging alumni to suspend all financial support of the university until Homecoming is reinstated. If there is one thing a Queen's student knows, it's the effectiveness of a strike to the pocketbook. Perhaps it will make a difference, perhaps not. It's just another incident in a long line of disturbing behaviour by the university, attempting to control or suppress the action of its students.

What really upset me today was an article about peer monitoring for political correctness. The university is going to train students that live in the dorms to eavesdrop for "questionable" talk amongst their peers, and then intervene with more correct suggestions.

I don't remember Queen's as a hotbed of racism and sexism. I do remember it as a stifling place of political over-correctness, though. Monitors? Not necessary. The other students do it already.

Why stop at suggesting politically correct alternatives? Why not train student spies to suggest everyone wear the latest Gap fashions, or to bathe on a daily basis, or to eat their vegetables? Any idea supported by Barbara Hall (the paragon of free speech) I immediately count as suspicious.

I'm not saying that anyone has the right to demean or debase another person or group. I am saying, however, that we all have the right to a personal opinion, and a right to express that opinion. I believe it's written down somewhere...oh yes, in the Charter of Rights! I also believe that every person has the intelligence to discern what may or may not be appropriate all by themselves.

How is it okay to send students to spy on their peers? It's not. You might as well just openly bug everyone's rooms. Sending in monitors doesn't create the atmosphere of openness and understanding that is needed to destroy racism. It feeds it. It feeds secrecy, and hiding, and all the things that nurture hatred. Let the Magisterium takeover begin.

When I was at Queen's, I learned two things very quickly. The first is that the school does its best into brainwashing you with its school "spirit" from the very beginning, which creates both loyalty and delusion. The second is that the school's image is more important than anything else. It's more important than its students or faculty excelling in their fields. And it's worth anything to protect that image.

Well, I've been inside, and I've seen how tarnished that image actually is. I have no illusions about the university I attended. My education was great, if impersonal and unfocused. I could have received the same education at most other Canadian institutions.

It's time the alumni association and the administration took the school off a pedestal and back into reality. Spend your energy and efforts into making your school into an institution worthy of my loyalty, instead of creating a false image that I don't really care about anyway.

I leave you with the (somewhat altered) words of the song so lovingly taught to us by our university-sanctioned frosh leaders and screaming alumni...

So put on your old Queen's sweater
the dirtier the better
and we'll all have another drink of beer (more beer!)
'cause it's not for the knowledge
that we come to this college
but to raise hell all the year

Oh they took away our party
and they banished privacy
and they took away that year song too (right Sci '02?)
but thank the dark matter above us
we still have brains among us
and our old Queen's sweater too...