It was an early Saturday morning last October when I found myself leaving Philadelphia by train, trapped next to a group of Brown and Penn students. As we made our way to the Philly suburb where we'd soon be canvassing door-to-door, I thought to myself how we, students from two different schools, were united for the day: We were there together to help Sen. John Kerry get elected.
But soon conversations between students of different schools took the form of mini-competitions, and my prideful feelings of unity evaporated. The Penn students chided us for taking all of our classes pass-fail and for having it easy; the Brown kids defended themselves by alluding to Penn as a place for no-fun workaholics.
Overhearing the petty contest, a classmate said to me: "I don't get this school rivalry thing. As students, as young people, we have so much more in common than we do differences. There's so much more that binds us together than that divides us. Why the hostility?"
Looking back on nearly two years of college life, my classmate's words still maintain their relevance. School rivalries are immature, misinformed and, worst of all, grounded in stereotypes and generalities. By engaging in the type of empty rhetoric I heard on the train that morning, we take what we don't know about another place and, instead of trying to understand it or relate to it, degrade it as much as possible. Or we take the best qualities of our own environment and exaggerate them in an attempt to characterize our whole school population. Both exercises begin as competition and thrive on misunderstanding and ignorance.
But college is where we go to combat ignorance, isn't it? Here, the goal isn't just to learn, it's to learn about new people, places and ideas and accept these once-foreign subjects with an open mind. As supposedly mature college students, we might be quick to shake our heads at a racial joke rooted in stereotypes, but we are likely to applaud a mode of thinking that generalizes students at other colleges in the same misinformed way.
Take Neale Mahoney's "Dismissing the anti-Brown" (Feb. 24). In this opinions column, Mahoney gives us his strange pseudo-ethnography, which he conducted while visiting Princeton for a weekend. His goal: to compare Brown students with Princeton students, and figure out which group is better. His results? Princeton students are "lame," while Brown students stand out in their "conviction and commitment" to political and ideological causes.
Now, I don't think that the author actually believes that all Princeton students are lame, but it seems that he does think that most are. He also believes that most are conservative. And preppy. And filthy rich. By the same token, in comparison, Mahoney explains that most Brown students are free-spirited, liberal and slightly poorer. Which makes us, what, cooler?
What's so dangerous here is not just that Mahoney dismisses an entire group of students as lame. It's that he uses the same tactic, reversed, to paint a brighter picture of the students on this campus than the one they actually deserve. By declaring that all Brown students show "conviction and commitment" to humanitarian causes, citing the charity tables in the post office as an example, Mahoney attempts to simplify our student body as near-perfect, as though we have achieved the pinnacle of political activism. The truth is that a large percentage of students here do not engage in any activism or service in the community, and by saying they do, Mahoney fails to look inward at our student body and critique it honestly. If we keep turning away from our shortcomings, we can never reflect on those shortcomings to ultimately make change for the better.
My point here is not just that stereotypes are bad. Most of us agree that they are. But when we talk about college rivalries, we continue to condone language that employs these generalities. The truth is that college students may have more in common than people in any other age cohort. Whether attending a community college or a so-called upper-tier school, whether in the Midwest or in New England, students can find unity in their dedication, to some extent, to the pursuit of learning and self-growth, in their knowledge that they will play a role in the future successes or failures of this world.
That goes for any college student, no matter what the school.
Joshua Lerner '07 is a Princeton student in disguise.
