The Bowdoin Orient

The Bowdoin community does a fantastic job celebrating the successes of our own. I remember as a student feeling that the Bowdoin homepage was filled with a never ending stream of content featuring students receiving awards, professors producing groundbreaking scholarship, and alums making a difference outside of the Bowdoin Bubble. 

Now as an alum, I visit bowdoin.edu less frequently, but the Bowdoin Magazine and Facebook fill the void in my life with profiles of people like Edwin Lee, San Francisco’s mayor, and proud commentary from friends on our ascension up both prestigeous and inane rankings like the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges and Glamour’s 25 Horniest Colleges in the Country. When you throw Bowdoin’s Twitter feed and the Orient’s coverage into the mix, it seems that just about every major and minor accomplishment related to the Bowdoin community gets documented. That’s awesome and I’m proud to be a part of such an incredibly supportive community. 

Every once in a while, however, something slips through the cracks. Stories can get lost in the shuffle because of bad timing with the calendar or because they contain a streak of controversiality—falling out of step with the lowest-common-denominator values of the Bowdoin community. Whatever the reason, I’m writing to make sure that we stop and take a moment to recognize and appreciate Director of Student Life Allen Delong’s excellent article on the Huffington Post on November 25. 

You worked your ass off. If you ended up at Bowdoin, somewhere along the way you put serious time and effort into getting good at something. That something might have been excelling in academics, dominating in sports, playing a musical instrument, saving the world, or not screwing up the deck stacked in your favor, but regardless, you figured something out.

So you got here. And assuming you graduate, you can always claim to be a real “Bowdoin Man,” or in the post-1971 tradition, a real “Bowdoin Woman.” That’s really great too—but that’s sort of where the buck stops in today’s world. 

Despite a sexy-sounding slogan a few years back, none of us can legitimately say, “I am Bowdoin.” Or maybe all of us can say it, so it means nothing. 

This past week, the Supreme Court spent time reviewing a challenge to California’s Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage in California illegal, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denied same-sex couples the same federal benefits as their heterosexual counterparts. In a spoof article on Wednesday covering the justices’ deliberations, The Onion ran an incisive piece of critical analysis with the headline, “Supreme Court on Gay Marriage: ‘Sure, who cares’.”  

In response to Attorney Cooper, the attorney defending Proposition 8, who said, “gay marriage could harm the moral fabric of the country and hurt the institution of marriage,” The Onion reported that Associate Justice Sotomayor asked, “What are you even talking about?” while Justice Anthony Kennedy “muttered, ‘You got to be fucking kidding me,’ under his breath.”

Unfortunately, because it’s The Onion reporting, actual events didn’t unfold quite like that. 

Fucking up at Bowdoin really isn’t easy. Scratch that. Fucking up at Bowdoin is really easy. Talking about it is the hard part.

Have you ever noticed that when you’re applying to colleges, the rating sites use this statistic: “percent of students that graduate in five years?” Never made sense to me. It only takes four. Could that many students have had existential crises and had to skip town for a year to pose for pictures in Africa?

Now I get it. People fail sometimes. Plans go awry. Shit hits the fan. Even super successful Nietzschean mind controlling supermen make mistakes occasionally.

Our parents had Vietnam. We had Meatless Monday. They went on strike, boycotting class to protest a war. We wrote some snippy articles, bought a Big Mac, and let Fox News holla at us. Political engagement isn’t dead at Bowdoin, but it’s on life support.

Almost two weeks ago, Epicuria happened, and our normally cliquey and divided student body came together in one of those rare moments when debauchery overshadows the crippling social paralysis that often pervades our community. This paralysis stems from students constantly judging and being judged by their peers. For one night, though, the drinking culture veered into unfamiliar territory—uncivilized and unsafe, it became a pagan affair.

Op-ed columns are usually just exercises in narcissism. So let’s cut through the bullshit. Today’s column is all about me. I’m a Bowdoin student and I’m important. I do things at Bowdoin and I’ll be doing things in the world one day.

I forget which generation I belong to. I can google it at a moment's notice on one of my million devices and find out, so why bother remembering?