Opinion

Are you an asshole?

Denying social responsibility at UMaine

By Tracy Collins

Posted on Sept. 22, 2003, at 12:00 a.m.

Are we the student body of the University of Maine or the future assholes of America?

We may be both. Though we have the potential to exceed the expectations the cynical baby boomers hold for us, in the name of tradition and in the habit of laziness, we may be learning to make the same mistakes made by our parents’ generation – following obediently in doomed footsteps and forgetting that this nation will soon be ours to re-create, not simply to maintain.

In the worst case scenario, Student Body President Matt Rodrigue and the members of the student senate will use their experience in Orono to become the next George W. Bushes, subverting principles of social responsibility and honesty in favor of serving the interests of the corporate elite. The Maine Campus writers will leave Orono to continue the current practice, exemplified by the New York Times or the Washington Post, of outrageously biased journalism. Business majors will climb the corporate ladders of Pepsi, Wal-Mart and Gap and watch their young laborers with old eyes struggle for their below-living wage.

Current members of the Maine Peace Action Coalition, Wilde Stein and the Student Women’s Association will only find support in their equally ignored commodified dissenters and political rockers like today’s Pearl Jam and Fifteen. Their large scale protests, as those against the war in Iraq, will be dismissed by political leaders as being insignificant and an inaccurate representation of the majority opinion. This is the nightmare.

Already several twenty-somethings have given up on their generation’s capabilities as they meet the status quo and complete the assigned reading for their Introductions to Life as an American Laborer classes. This pessimism takes form in shared beliefs that legalized marriage for gays, the end of sweatshop labor, a sense of confidence in the decisions of political leaders and media fairness and objectivity will never be achieved within our lifetimes.

Such ideas are an enraging cop-out – a denial of personal responsibility and the product of our laziness. Some political science majors, business majors, pre-law majors and journalism majors continue to see themselves as nothing more than students, instead of individuals whose actions, decisions and beliefs will not just shape, but create, the future of the nation.

Essentially, students take two paths when they pass through college. In the first, a “monkey see, monkey do” approach: The student excels in courses focusing on skill-building and looks to the past for direction. In the second path, crucial to building a more just society instead of maintaining the flaws of the current one, the student moves beyond the precedents of the past and is daring enough to recognize his or her power to fix looming social problems like socioeconomic inequality, patriarchal tendencies in politics and the abuse of media power.

We, the students, can and should recognize our own ability to re-create America, and further, the university can take steps to ensure its students are not cookie cutter college graduates, but rather, individuals who have a passionate commitment to their fellow Americans.

As the flagship university in the University of Maine system, department heads should consider requiring more seminar courses that focus on the issues in each area of study. Then, business students will be aware of the consequences of such practices as sweatshop labor, political science students will understand that their first responsibility is to their constituents, not to the corporate bigwigs, and journalism majors will know that the power of the media is massive and to abuse that power is to abuse every audience member or reader who relies on them for accurate and complete information about their community with which to base their opinions and actions.

In 20 short years, we will be the influential adults that we are now learning from. Our choices are two. They are black and white – absolute. There is no middle ground. We can either blindly follow in the footsteps of those ahead us, trusting their experience absolutely, or we can question their actions, make decisions based on our own beliefs, and bear in mind our responsibility to those we affect in our pursuits of the capitalist ideal.

Tracy Collins is a junior journalism major.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2003, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.