Northwestern students are apathetic. This fact is not open to argument. It doesn’t need to be proven, and it doesn’t require justification. We acknowledge it, we use it to explain other points in Daily articles or discussion sections, and we move on with our lives. While evolution is taught as a theory, the apathetic nature of the NU student body has the status of an on-campus status natural law.
Together, Organized Action by Students Invested in Society and the NU Community Development Corps send students to 40 volunteer sites in the Chicago area every week. During spring break, groups such as Alternative Student Breaks, the University Christian Ministry and the Global Engagement Summit sent students to places as diverse as New Orleans, El Salvador and Guatemala. A month ago, Dance Marathon raised $933,855 for Bear Necessities Pediatric Cancer Foundation, in May Suitcase Party will host their big event to benefit Christopher House and throughout Spring Quarter dozens of sororities and fraternities will raise money for their individual philanthropies.
There are at least four major news sources on campus, including The Daily, North by Northwestern, the Northwestern News Network and WNUR radio. Other publications such as Northwestern University Does Everything, Stitch, and Schmooze publish less often but still impact campus culture. There are dozens of campus performing arts groups that constantly put on professional level performances. There is an advocacy group for every genre and constituency of our diverse student body.
April is Global Awareness Month, during which NU student groups will hold three separate conferences bringing students from all around the world to campus to discuss global change and justice. This week is also Sex Week, put on by College Feminists. Groups from Rainbow Alliance to A&O Productions to Hillel are working with College Fems this week, and the group Women of Worth is also hosting an alternative forum for women who don’t approve of a week centered on sex.
So please, explain to me where I find this apathy I hear so much about.
Apathy is what you make of it. While I’m interested in globalization and human rights journalism, other students want to make movies, organize events for their sorority or perform in an orchestra. It’s not a sliding scale of value; where there’s involvement, there isn’t apathy.
As students, we complain about NU’s recent fall in rankings and blame the administration for not making NU appealing enough to prospective high school seniors. Frankly, if I had Googled NU in high school and read that its students considered themselves apathetic, awkward Ivy-rejects, I probably never would have toured campus. We have such an inferiority complex, it makes me want to transfer just to be with people who are proud of the place they’ve decided to spend four years of their lives.
We need to stop complaining about what we’re not and decide what we are. We attend a university with enormous financial, academic and student resources. We should start taking advantage of them, or at least acknowledge their existence, before boxing ourselves into this inescapable category of “apathetic.”
Don’t take NU students for granted. Most of them are brilliant with strong personalities that got them here and will serve them well in their future careers. So maybe a lot of people go to The Keg and drink every Monday. Does that devalue the contributions they made at a meeting a few hours before, or the theses they’re writing to graduate?
NU students are apathetic. It’s a law, a fact, a declaration. Why fight against it when it’s so much easier to bitch about it for all it’s worth? Maybe in reality it’s not apathy we need to fight, but our own insecurities.
– Liz Coffin Karlin
Weinberg sophomore
Assistant Campus Editor
American Delegate Partnerships Co-chair,
Global Engagement Summit
