What is it with us?

We’re a good school. We’re fun. We’re No. 12 in the U.S. News & World Report ranking of national universities, ahead of two Ivies and every other school in our conference. We’ve won shares of three of the last seven Big Ten football titles. And come hell or more protests, we’ll have at least 15 acres of gray water and mutant sturgeon in the center of campus for months to come.

So then why do we truck out a Chicago-sized inferiority complex whenever it’s time to decorate around here? The more I walk around this campus, the more it starts to seem like a shrine to the rest of the Big Ten. It’s as if we’re afraid the conference will forget we even exist if we don’t constantly remind them that we did not, in fact, jump ship with the University of Chicago in 1946.

Take the sports facilities. It’s one thing for the stadium formerly known as Dyche to fly our opponents’ pennants over the locker room tunnel. But the basketball gym is another story. We give ourselves banners on either side of the court, and then the rest of the gym goes to everyone else, with banners for all our conference opponents circling the ceiling – including one for the University of Michigan that’s dyed the wrong shade of blue. Courtside seats and the upper deck at Welsh-Ryan Arena might belong to state school scalpers throughout the Midwest, but you’d think maybe we could downplay the whole “home court disadvantage” thing when it comes to the rafters.

Then there’s the parking garage at Evanston Hospital, where friends and family of injured Buckeyes, Badgers and Illini can park in the comfort of their own school colors and hum their fight songs as they march to the emergency room.

But nothing comes close to the sense of pride we all experience while walking through Norris University Center. The days of finding a meeting room based on the floor number in its name have yielded to this wacked-out time, when Northwestern students spend an hour asking for directions to things like the Iowa, Big Ten or your choice of the kiss-Purdue’s-ass A or kiss-Purdue’s-ass B Rooms.

It’s as if we think plastering the names and colors of our 10 big brothers all over the place will either keep them from beating us up or somehow legitimize our existence in the grand scheme of giant research factories. NU has an identity all its own, not quite in the ivy-drenched Gothic world of the East Coast elite, nor in the 20,000-undergrad, city-sized campus universe of the schools in the hospital garage.

What ever happened to school pride? Why can’t we turn our home courts into orgies of purple? Why not name Norris rooms after great alumni? Teach students about first black Chicago mayor Harold Washington, novelist Saul Bellow or heart-surgery pioneer Dr. Daniel Hale Williams. Decorate rooms for Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould, Indiana-stinkhole namesake Elbert Gary or first commissioner of baseball Kennesaw Mountain Landis. It’d be a heck of a lot more fun than hanging smiling gophers in the Minnesota closet on the second floor.

Pick 10 random sophomores in South-Mid Quads and name a bunch of rooms after them. Or get somebody to actually finance some decent meeting, eating and studying space in a livable student union and name the rooms after their cousins. What do I care? Just make it about NU.