The More Things Change: Why I’m not Worried about Wabash
A couple of months ago, I sat in on one of the student-faculty discussion sessions for a new all-campus course to replace Cultures and Traditions. And when I say “sat in,” I mean just that. I was an observer, not a participant. The session had all of the telltale markings of a C&T discussion: students who raised deep, philosophical questions; professors who challenged them; students who said stupid things that made everyone upset; students who said stupid things just for the sake of talking; students who took it upon themselves to give the students who said stupid things attention by attacking them; and finally, students like myself, who quietly watched the clock and prayed for the good LORD to accelerate time and end it all.
So if nothing else, the session reaffirmed my faith that no matter what is decided about the curriculum in the coming years, given a consistent student and professor recruitment program, some things about Wabash will simply never change. But many other things clearly do. The student outrage over the nixing of C&T this year caught me off guard. It was a debate that I did not anticipate, and from which I remained detached. But I’m a second semester senior, with one foot at Wabash and the other foot in graduate school. My connection with the campus, and the student body, is not nearly as strong as it used to be.
For a place so steeped in traditions, it’s amazing how short the institutional memory of Wabash really is. After just four years here, I practically feel like Dr. Blix in the amount of stories I can tell. I get blank stares from underclassmen when I refer to “Dean” Bambrey. I can’t display my “freshman pot” without people assuming that I am a Phi Delt. Virtually no one remembers Crawford or Kingery Hall. Much of the campus now assumes that College Hall and the TKE house have always been pristine and shiny — as opposed to the dark, smelly, frightening combination TKE/College building that I visited during honor scholars. Soon the longtime home of Wabash baseball — Mud Hollow — will become the home of a soccer field (If Dr. Webb were on campus, he would no doubt protest).
So things change here, and they change quickly. The attention of the student body is one of those things. “I truly believe that many years from now, historians of this college will write about this time as one of the most challenging and darkest times in the College’s history,” Cody Stipes recently wrote of the C&T debate in The Bachelor. A year ago, we were all saying that about the Delt closing. Two decades ago, students were saying that about the co-ed debate.
Every class has its battles and its pains. For mine, it was the Delt closing. I’ve heard several of my peers refer to the death of Johnny Smith as Wabash’s 9/11. “Everything changed after that,” they say. It certainly consumed my time here. During my yearlong tenure as editor-in-chief of this publication, there was not one issue of The Phoenix that did not reference the incident in some way. It shook my faith in the Wabash administration and in the Gentleman’s Rule, and it colored my very perception of this place.
Still, through it all, my relationship with Wabash can only be described as love. But I don’t mean love in any watered-down sense of the word. I mean the kind of love that is blind — that overlooks imperfections, and forgives constant annoyances, and suffers the insufferable for semester after semester, but still endures with unshakeable loyalty.
Like any intangible entity with the power to inspire great passion, Wabash is as much an idea as an institution. It is the idea that college-aged men, from backgrounds diverse but not spectacular, can live and learn together in a liberal arts environment, and govern themselves — not through adherence to a list of rules, but through dedication to a higher calling of honor. It is the idea of Wabash that inspires the love of students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Wabash will have its ups and downs financially. There will be semesters of pain and grief and depression. Sometimes it will not live up to its own ideals. But as long as those ideals remain — as long as we strive for something higher — Wabash will be the love of her loyal sons, and the envy of most other schools.
Even after everything I have seen here, that idea remains strong — and if it should ever be threatened, there are plenty of fine writers for this publication who will eagerly defend it. I will be graduating soon and entering a world where there are plenty of things for me to worry about. I don’t think that the survival of my alma mater is one of them.
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