Tradition Envy

Apparently unsatisfied with 141 years worth of their own tradition and two millennia of Catholic tradition, Boston College (BC) has formed a “Student Tradition Task Force” charged with devising additional useless rituals. Perhaps BC can take a page or two from Harvard, that venerable old repository of pointless and counterproductive traditions. A few suggestions:

• Usher endless hordes of tourists in front of a decrepit old statue and glibly encourage them to rub its urine-encrusted toe for good luck.

• Force first-years to strip naked and run in circles in the midst of howling winds and Arctic temperatures —the night before the biggest exam of their lives. It builds character.

• Snotty clubs are a great way to foment tradition! Give all social space on campus to clubs that only accept the most privileged 5 percent of students.

• Require students to fight for air in 900-person lectures so that they can discover new “approaches to knowledge.”

• Every few years, threaten to take away students’ most beloved traditions and replace them with convoluted proposals to make administrators’ lives easier. That’s a sure-fire way to build trust and loyalty in an institution.

• Ship one quarter of students off to an impossibly remote secondary campus. And then, when planning to expand the campus, be sure to banish another contingent of students to a different city across the river. Minimizing student interaction is the basis of many fun-filled traditions.

• Connect students with traditional ways of life by allowing them to use fireplaces in dorm rooms. Better yet, house them all in dorm rooms equipped with fireplaces and then suddenly forbid all fireplace use. In the dead of winter, shivering and cold, students will stare longingly at the empty corner of their rooms where for decades passed fellow undergraduates once curled up for warmth. Ah, traditions! They produce such pleasant memories.

Of course, BC might not want to adopt all of our traditions. After all, back-breaking workloads and a sub-par social scene may have long histories here. Not every university can live up to the Harvard mystique, but we have inklings that BC is on the road to success. After all, they seem to have mastered Harvard’s greatest tradition of all: a penchant for forming pointless bureaucratic committees.