01/19/07
When I was in high school we didn’t have a student lounge. We went to school to attend classes, not lounge around. The teachers, of course, had a lounge, but since the students weren’t allowed in the teacher’s lounge we never knew for sure what really went on in there. There were rumors, but never any hard facts to back them up. I know most of the stories that circulated were rumors because I started the majority of them. Especially the ones involving drunken orgies that went on in the teacher’s lounge during 5th and 6th period lunch hours. But, the students were neither encouraged nor allowed to lounge around the school.
At college (or colleges in my case) there was a “student union” or “student center” which was a gathering place for all students on campus. One part of all student unions was the “bookstore” from which you could purchase a wide variety of apparel (hats, sweatshirts, T-shirts, etc.) with the school logo, an even wider variety of toiletries, some snacks and candy bars and even a few school supplies, but I don’t think I ever saw anyone actually buy books at the bookstore. Another part of the student center was the lounge area which consisted of some sofas and chairs arranged in such a way as to promote intercourse (no, not THAT kind of intercourse, although there were some rumors started…) between the students. And, of course, every student center had a “snack bar” from which one could purchase highly nutritious grease soaked cheeseburgers, trans-fat saturated French fries, sodium rich hot dogs and high sugar content soft drinks. If it was a free-thinking, open minded school (and by that I mean one with wealthy and generous alumni) there might even be a “game room”. By “game room” I mean a place where they put the pool tables, card tables and pinball machines (guess where I spent most of my time?). My point is to pointedly point out that the students had a place to congregate and get to know one another. ALL the students congregated there and got to know ALL the other students. They ALL congregated there because it was the ONLY place to congregate.
I told you all of that to tell you all of this. I was recently reading a newspaper article about a new “student recreational complex” being built at a major university. It seems the “student center” has come a long way since my time in college. This particular “student recreational complex” will have a 20 person hot tub for the students to relax in after a hard day of matriculating. The closest thing I had to that was when the drain backed up in the guys shower room and flooded the first floor of the dorm. There will be a sushi bar, a juice bar and two separate pizza parlors, but no mention was made of greasy cheeseburgers. The lounge area will have several big-screen Hi-Def TV’s which will not only have access to a multitude of satellite stations, but will also be hooked up to a multitude of X-boxes and Playstations (I wonder if they have pinball software?). Where I went to school there was no TV in the student union, and the dorm where I lived only had one black and white TV for about 400 guys which had crappy reception on all four stations it could pick up. In the new rec. complex there will be a room with 100 high powered computers for the sole purpose of allowing the students to keep up on emails and instant messaging. I had one pay phone at the other end of the dorm hallway from my room, and it was usually in use or broken. There will be an area in the new student center where students can go to receive a professional massage. The only massage I ever got in college was from a girl who wouldn’t have massaged what I wanted her to massage if I hadn’t first bought her a lot of beer just to get her to do so.
But the thing that I think bothers me the most about this new student recreational complex is the area they refer to as the “Multicultural Center”. This is a place that is said to celebrate cultural diversity. There’s an “African American Students Center”, a “Native American Students Center”, an “Asian American Students Center”, a “Hispanic American Students Center”, a “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Students Center”, and even a “Women Students Center” (did anyone else notice there wasn’t a “Straight White Guys Center”?). And while I have absolutely nothing against anyone celebrating their cultural heritage, I personally feel all these separate “Centers” do is provide a way for all those heritages to remain separate. This country became great because it was a “melting pot” not a bunch of separate ingredients, and as long as we continue to provide ways for the ingredients to stay separated and to grow farther apart we will never again see the greatness we once proudly enjoyed.
While the places I went to school don’t seem to have had all the conveniences and luxuries provided to students today, we had togetherness and were allowed to bond across cultural barriers because we weren’t provided supposedly “rightful” ways to remain separated. Sometimes “progress” doesn’t really move us forward, does it?