Consider the freshmen.
Just as we have all been infants, we have all been freshmen.
In a way, it is reasonable to equate our newest of students with our newest of humans, given that both cohorts don’t know where they are at any given moment, need to be fed and looked after, and shouldn’t be allowed to play in the street or enter Bobb.
The logical choice to keep the Wildkittens on the straight and narrow is to fill their first college days with graphic sexual assault Essential NUs and other wholesome things. The administration wants to teach them to protect themselves and their friends, to make smart decisions, as Burgie loves to tell us.
The freshmen aren’t dumb, though. Or actual babies (or actual kittens, for that matter). But they are vulnerable and sometimes sad and overwhelmed and scared and seemingly perpetually lost. And given recent tragic and unsettling events like the loss of our friend and classmate Harsha Maddula, the freshmen need as many open arms, understanding places to talk, and comforting words from their peers and elders as they can get.
Why not give them a safe place to land? Why not give them a place where they can sit around a big warm table with upperclassmen every week and talk for hours? Why not give them a place that sponsors a lasting sense of community? Why not give them something actually wholesome to divert them from the herd mentality of their naive fellow Wildkittens slinking up to the frat quad every weekend?
NU’s Chabad House was my safe place to land. Chabad’s doors were some of the first I walked through my freshman year, and I’ve been back almost every week since. There was always Rabbi Dov Hillel Klein’s smiling face welcoming me in. There was always that group of people that I came to know very well throughout the years, people I now count as some of my closest friends. And there was always hot homemade soup. Oh, the poems I could write to that soup!
I was particularly gobsmacked (yes, gobsmacked) to hear allegations that Rabbi was somehow endangering students. I was even more shocked to hear that it was because of Chabad’s alcohol policy. I can understand that someone might hear the words “liquor” and “freshmen” together and start swooning from the horror of it all — because the freshmen and other minors never find or drink alcohol even a little bit sometimes in the history of the universe ever, and especially not at Northwestern. But the swooners need to realize that combo is only dangerous in certain atmospheres. Chabad is not a let’s-get-schwasted environment. It’s not a date rape scene. It’s not a place where people stumble over the prone bodies of blacked-out students and pools of vomit.
Not even close. Never in recent memory. I can speak as someone who has gone to almost every event and activity of any description for the last four years.
As a parent or University official, I would rather have my kid have one small cup of Manischewitz or a single half-shot of JD over the course of an entire dinner — sometimes going late into the night — than go to a frat party on a Friday night. I’m not going to jump on the frat-bash train, but I know what goes bump in the night on North Campus. I lived there all three of my wonderful years here. I lived in a first-floor room next to the porch of a certain fraternity that urged its blackout drunk partygoers to puke over the side of their stoop (conveniently located three feet from my window) so that they wouldn’t ruin the frat’s carpet. This happened frequently, and that’s dangerous and gross, if you hadn’t noticed.
Never in my four years on Chabad’s student exec board, during my time as a Sinai Scholars coordinator at Chabad, during my Rabbi Klein-led Birthright trip to Israel, or on innumerable Shabbats and holidays have I felt like Rabbi was a danger to students or anything but a rock in the craziness of so many college students’ lives. He’s a positive role model who has so immeasurably helped so many students that I cannot comprehend a Northwestern without him.
There was always Chabad. There was always Rabbi. There was always soup. And I hope the University decides to re-affiliate with Chabad and with Rabbi to ensure that these remain on campus for years to come.
Emily Davidson is a Weinberg senior and a Tannenbaum Chabad Executive Board Member. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, email a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].
