Since coming to Northwestern, I’ve heard the word “community” about 17,343, 278, 429 times. Someone’s always trying to say how we lack it or complain about how we can’t have it or, worst of all, build it. And every time we try to build it, we also try to measure it. Some group puts on a barbecue and then all the folks roaming around the 3rd floor of Norris ask, “Was there community? Did you build it? How much?!” Well, if we’re going to measure community, let’s do it right.
I propose a brand new unit, to put alongside your meters, moles, and Faradays. It’s the “community unit.” With the community unit, our obnoxious and embarrassingly over-zealous attempts to quantify community can finally be easy and accurate.
I can see it now – student group leaders walking around with clipboards, observing other students while they watch their shows, eat dinner or breathe, calculating and recalculating the number of community units they’ve created. Or, god forbid, destroyed.
You know that new plasma TV in the Foster-Walker Complex? That’s five community units. When administration painted the NU logo in there that added 15.
And the NUCuisine campaign? The one where you eat like a celebrity with foreign studies credit? Yeah, that was -7. No wait, we all got to make fun of it, so it was +3.
Not bad, NU. Not bad at all.
The administration, never willing to miss an opportunity to up community around campus, recently hatched a plan that I think will knock NU’s community units right out of the park (this reminds me, Cubs games are about 23 community units).
That’s right folks, it’s the Community Assistant program. There was a time when these CAs were called RAs, like they are at almost every school in the country. Back in those idyllic days of Spring 2005, everyone knew exactly where they stood. There were people who resided in students’ halls who assisted them when they had trouble. These were called Resident Assistants.
But NU, always a step ahead of the game, knew better. It’s a little-known fact that every time someone says “community”, a puppy is born, an angel gets its wings, and a university in Evanston gets a little more community. That’s why a name alteration will change our lives and community forever.
When I first heard about CAs, I feared for my friends taking up the job. I imagined freshmen football players stuffing them in trash cans or pyromaniacs burning the signs they crafted on students’ community-drenched doors. Not everyone understands the brilliance behind NU’s plan.
Some people imagine that community can’t be designed or calculated or contrived, but that it just happens. These amateurs think that it’s about meeting the right people, having some fun, and feeling like NU is a place you can tolerate.
For those people, I have just five words: Go to a state school.
That’s right, students shouldn’t have come here to pay exorbitant tuition if they didn’t want the greatest minds in the field constructing community in a laboratory. The CA program is just that – it’s stage-managing. It’s taking what at a lesser institution would be making memories on a personal level and turning it into the mass production of one-size-fits-all community. It’s really the latest in the science of community-building.
Despite the fact that NU is at the cutting edge of community-building technology, it doesn’t seem like there’s much community here. But who cares!
At least we’re crankin’ out the community units.
Prajwal Ciryam, a former two-time Associated Student Government academic vice-president, is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected].
