Blowing Off the Dust
To those who don't know me, I am a senior in the College Scholars Program, and you're reading part of my senior project! But first let me tell you a little about what this all this is about.
I was, once upon a time, on a committee that was looking at reasons why Case Western Reserve had such a low retention rate of students when compared to other universities deigned of our caliber. Lots of reasons were named, ranging from poor food, to amount of work, to poor food, but one item that kept coming back up was that we were a collection of cliques. Not cliques necessarily you remember from high school, where your association could make or break you, but cliques that had their inner social lives. This was in direct opposition to schools such as Duke, where nearly every student comes out on Saturday to scream their heads off. I'm not saying this is where we want to be, every Saturday coming to scream our heads off about watching the university Halo team fight it out (I'm sorry, I had to make the conversion to our level). Rather, there should be a better intermediate.
So the problem posited at the meeting is that there is no unifying student culture, and there can be many causes. I don't think there is one solution that will solve it all other than fire all faculty and students and bring in exactly who the university wants (I probably shouldn't be giving them ideas). But, let me offer the beginning of a solution. Myths.
Every campus, no matter how old or young they are, have myths. Old schools such as Harvard have myths such as the ghost of a 18th century man haunts their main library; young schools such as Olin have myths about the food they serve and where it comes from. Case, strangely enough, has few. Whether this is due to apathy, forceful conspiracy or other factors, this can not be easily explained. So here is the keystone of my plan: telling stories that are all true. Truth is what links all myths together, at one point or another. It is just through time and being passed on orally that details are frayed and lost, to where the story is now legend. And this is about planting those seeds.
So I have spent the past six months running from one end of the campus to the other end of Cleveland talking to alumni, looking through archives, books, all in an attempt to gather an interesting truth about the past. And it is the goal is to get people talking about these stories again, simply because they're interesting. It does not matter if they are brought up in class as evidence in an argument, or in a stream of thought discussion with roommates in the middle of the night. I've blown off the dust of these seeds, so let's see what will grow.
Edit: It has come to my attention that I had a slight oversight in making this blog and its title. I would like to make clear that this project is part of the College Scholars Program, and is not affiliated to the University Archives or any other archives.
By Greg Wu (gregory dot wu at case dot edu)
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