A month before the start of school, my mom sat me down on the couch with a laptop open, anxious to show her youngest son a collection of videos that she had found of Northwestern traditions. The first tab was a video titled “Wildside 101: Northwestern Football Traditions,” a video posted by an official NU YouTube account that features Coach Pat Fitzgerald rattling off school traditions. Sitting at the lead-off spot was “shaking your keys.”

I had never heard of the key shaking tradition, and my innocent, pre-freshman mind put it in the same category as any other noise maker. We shake our keys to distract the opposing team during the kick-off ? Get me a dorm key and sign me up. I didn’t think much more of the tradition, which I assumed was more about making sound than making a point.

Upon arriving at the Freshman Urban Program for pre-orientation, I quickly learned that the keys tradition was by no means what I had interpreted it to be. Instead, to many who explained it to me over the program, it is a distinct message to the other team: Regardless of the results of this game, you’re going to park our cars someday. I gave the student body the benefit of the doubt and assumed that many of the partakers of the tradition were unaware of its origins, just like I had been prior to arriving on campus. However it quickly became apparent that most of the student body understood the message.

NU is the only private university of the fourteen schools in the Big Ten, and by far the most expensive to attend, sitting at almost roughly $30,000 per year more than the conference average. Given the opportunity, many students throw the incredible privilege of attending this university in the face of those less socioeconomically advantaged, which is wrong and frankly embarrassing.

Beyond the inherent elitism that comes with dangling keys, the tradition simply is not funny. I am no stranger to the trash talk aspect of sports. I come from a high school with immense school pride and have partaken in my fair share of dancing-the-line antics at sporting events. I think trash talk is just as much a part of the game as anything else and has a legitimate place in sports. However, what is the purpose of indulging in a form of trash-talk that exposes and embarrasses no one but ourselves? Dangling our keys does not signify dominance over the opponent, but rather identifies our fans as lacking class.

The tradition is almost a childish defense mechanism against losing. It sends the message that as NU football fans that we don’t care about the results of the competition because, regardless of the score, we perceive ourselves as superior to our opponents. The tradition is not only elitist and unoriginal, but it’s poor school pride.

I find it entirely ironic that a school that is typically concerned with political correctness openly endorses this tradition by sharing it via YouTube. Our tradition of shaking keys should be rethought by the student body, and its endorsement by the administration is quite simply ludicrous. As football fans and as the larger NU community, we must reassess how we want our school to be perceived and hold ourselves to a higher standard of sportsmanship.

Lukas Stachtiaris is a Medill freshman. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.