Some days it feels as though every time I turn around, another one of my friends gets engaged.

Of course, they aren’t really getting engaged. They’re only engaging their communities, they’re engaging their globe and they’re engaging Northwestern. And now they’re forming a engagement club. The NU Engagement Coalition, where all Northwestern’s happily engaged students get together and talk about how happily engaged they are, how unhappily unengaged everyone else must be and how to engage all those discontented disengagers.

There, I’ve done it. I’ve managed to use the term ‘engage’ a dozen times in one paragraph, which has got to be a personal record, but still nothing compared to the frequency with which the term has been bandied about in recent months by NU’s engagement-elite.

Shockingly, the NUEC isn’t alone in this. Together with the “oNe Northwestern Campaign,” they lead a bizarre new trend at Northwestern – student leaders becoming fixated on defining and promoting some elusive idea of “engagement” for the equally nebulous Northwestern “community.”

Now, I have no beef with community. But the Northwestern community is in no need of redefinition. We have for more than 150 years been a community united solely in a common pursuit of knowledge. We are not, as oNe Northwestern has it, a community united in reminiscing about the stir fry in Hinman or kvetching about Henry Bienen not showing up to your improv show. Nor are we, as NUEC has it, a community defined by our service to others. Community service is certainly honorable, but the purpose of college it is not.

Consider for a moment the student who spends all his time in a basement laboratory of Tech, tinkering with chemicals and pondering new technologies. For the NUEC, he’s the very picture of disengagement, and they would like nothing more than to pluck him out from Tech and put him to work in the community.

If the NUEC has its way, in 20 years we’ll have a full supply of volunteers eager to administer vaccines and nobody capable of inventing them.

This is precisely the reason why colleges have historically been designed for disengagement. Students left their homes to avoid meddling with the ephemeral issues of their communities, so as to engage with ideas in books and lectures and grow as thinkers and creators.

I spend a lot of time in class, reading books and listening to lectures. In these courses, I ‘engage’ with ideas theories and concepts. I’m delighted to live in a community where that kind of engagement is encouraged and expected. The hope is, as it has always been, that someday I’ll be able to use these ideas to make some contribution to my community. That’s the chemistry major’s hope, at least, and a hope well worth preserving.

SESP senior Jake Wertz can be reached at [email protected].