It’s Saturday morning, and there’s an energy across campus. Students meet up with friends and don their school gear, applying temporary tattoos and face paint for the afternoon’s football game. Tailgating starts two hours before game time. The student body packs the stands and holds its collective breath in anticipation of the game to come.
Any Brown student would tell you that sort of rally is not something they’ve experienced, at least not on their own campus. Prototypical school spirit is a trait that Brown unambiguously lacks. Sports events are poorly attended, and you wouldn’t know the words to our fight song unless you Googled them (I did, to make sure we had one).
Such an absence of spirit, at least outside of Brown’s campus, is considered a bad thing. Athletes bemoan poor attendance, and my friends at other schools sympathize with what they see as my lack of a genuine college community.
I, however, cannot join in these lamentations. As an avid sports fan, I often wish Brown sold out basketball and lacrosse games and rallied behind its successful teams. Yet though Brown lacks spirit in a traditional sense, a pride — not in Brown’s history but in its principles — permeates the campus.
Brown is unique, and its students, to varying degrees, understand their role in its bold experiment in education. The open curriculum and the S/NC option encourage academic experimentation with no risk of killing your grade point average in the process. Alas, the unthinkable: learning for learning’s sake.
These popular features are not what outsiders may think of as convenient ways for students to avoid requirements and reduce their workloads. Brown’s policy is the manifestation of a bold vision, one that posits that students can be trusted with their own education.
I do not mean to act as if I am above participating in spirited activities on campus. Far from it. Every time I watch Brown’s soccer team at Stevenson Field or tailgate a football game, I wish that others at Brown shared my love of sports. There is a rush associated with blind and whole-hearted institutional pride — a rush that I fully embraced throughout high school. My point is only this: There are worse things to worry about.
Brown students are proud of where they go to school, and for the most part, they’re happy about it. I believe this is the most valuable type of pride, a pride that is quiet and soft-spoken. It is neither arrogance nor the sort of blind, drone-like institutional allegiance so common among colleges and countries. It says not that our school is best, only that it is best for us. It’s founded in something more substantive, and altogether more real, than a fight song or a football team.
Brown students may miss out on a fun aspect of college life, but our soft-spoken pride creates a more tight-knit community than would packed stadiums or primal fight songs. I claim only that this is a different sort of pride — a pride stemming from something more concrete than colors and mascots. It is a pride not in where we go to school so much as in how we go to school, a pride built from something greater than the simple fact that we all eat at the same dining halls and study in the same libraries.
George Bernard Shaw once called patriotism “your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it,” and I see traditional school spirit as a conviction along similar lines. Yet just as a true patriot believes not only in his country but also in its values and principles, so a true spirit arises from a pride not only in a school’s name but also in its practices.
Traditions can be helpful in unifying a community, but I prefer the institution that talks about what it is today. If Brown lacks traditional spirit, it is because it glorifies the individual and pokes holes in the belief that a school should be most proud of its athletics department. I would rather be proud of a curriculum than a mascot.
Nicholas Esemplare ’18 is a double concentrator in English and economics. He can be reached at nicholas_esemplare@brown.edu.
