From now on whenever I offend anyone, I’m going to say it was satire.
A few days ago, Miami University’s newspaper, the Miami Student, published an opinion piece by a student entitled “Students should respect the Miami stereotype, embrace its reputation”. Read it here. The article reads like a quickly written list of things that make Miami students better than everyone else; as he puts it, “traits that students from the rest of the country only dream of”. These are apparently as follows: 1) Attractiveness. 2) Level of rhetoric. 3) Work Ethic. 4) Being “showy, but in the right way”. This one’s a little confusing, but the author points to Miami students’ ability to integrate their many status symbols and conspicuous consumption seamlessly into everyday life with an ease that the rest of we awkward iPhone-clutchers can only dream of. I added that last part.
What the student really intended to accomplish by writing the piece is unclear to me, but it’s gotten under the skin of a lot of people, including myself and a friend of mine who attends Miami – when last I checked, 150 people had posted facebook comments (with mixed opinions ranging from “kill yourself” to “everything in this article is true, Miami students are awesome”). In case you aren’t familiar with the Miami stereotype, let me briefly explain.
Located in Southwestern Ohio, Miami University (often referred to as Miami of Ohio since the name of the school is slightly misleading) is a pretty solid academic institution. It’s considered a “public ivy,” for what that’s worth. But it has this small problem of its reputation preceeding it. Socially. Miami students are known for having expensive and trendy clothes (North Face, Sperry Topsiders, Ugg Boots), a GreekLife-dominated social scene, and just a touch of hubris. The school is pretty rural, stashed away in the small town of Oxford, and from the outside it can look a little like a pressure cooker of the kind of social pressures some of us weren’t fond of in high school. I’m not sure what it looks like from the inside.
Anyhow the stereotype, and ostensible lack of diversity, are enough to keep some students from really considering the school, myself included. But aside from just being a little off-putting, the Miami reputation feels personal somehow. Other reputations of schools, for being nerdy (Case Western Reserve, Carnegie-Mellon) or a party school (Ohio University) don’t bother people in quite the same way that Miami’s does. You might say it’s enough to cast them under a bit of a critical eye. When you think someone thinks they’re better than you, you look for ways that they aren’t.
So when the piece in the Student started making the rounds, it was a little irritating to see someone so blatantly confirming the stereotype of Miami students as spoiled and pretentious, and encouraging students to continue being so obviously head and shoulders above the rest. The possibility of its being satire crossed my mind, but it just plain doesn’t read that way – why satirize your own classmates, and for being hardworking and articulate among other traits?
After receiving such a strong response from students, faculty, and the facebook masses, the author printed a note apologizing for any offensive content and insisting that the whole thing was just intended as, you guessed it, light-hearted satire to entertain fellow students. Which I have to say sounded more like “I’m sorry you can’t take a joke” than anything else. Maybe it was satire, but if it was, it was the most confusing and ill-thought-out piece of satire I’ve read since we had that one assignment in tenth grade English. The author clearly didn’t think about how the piece might be received and, if it got out to the masses, what stereotypes it truly might perpetuate. He says he just wanted to entertain students (and maybe boost morale?) but he chose to do so by cutting down students from other top universities, and listing those universities specifically. Not exactly the stuff of satire.
The paper also printed an editor’s note that they don’t shield readers from controversial views and they hope that the piece will promote discussion, etc. In this case, they may as well have said “we can’t be held responsible for anything said in opinion pieces because we don’t read them before we print them”. Hindsight is 20/20, but I can’t imagine it would have been that difficult for an editor to anticipate the potential damaging consequences the piece could have for the school, hard-to-detect satire or not, and advised a shift in the angle.
I hope I’m overestimating the damage done to the reputation of Miami, because it really is a good school with a lot of great people. Lesson of the day: don’t take one person’s poorly written opinion to be representative of an entire student body, and please, please, think before you publish.
I’m walking home when I see it. So much happens when I’m walking home. I’m a pedestrian of necessity, and so walking is when I notice things, think of things. It’s on the ground by my right foot, I must be lost in thought, I don’t see it coming. A baby bird, dead on its back, beak to the sky, tiny eyes closed. Some if not all baby birds are born without feathers, or at least not the kind of feathers you think of when you think of birds. They have these little clear spines that come down from their wings where their feathers will grow, and pink skin. I know because I’ve seen this very thing once before, walking home from where the bus dropped me off as a child, a bird had built its nest on the streetlight and a baby bird was dead beneath it. At the time I was in the seventh grade and either felt so moved by it or wanted to feel so moved by it that I decided to bury the thing, carefully, without touching it. I think I was just at that age where you do things like that, dramatic acts, because you want to be the type of person who does them.
And today here it is again, and I’m not going to bury it, but I stop, and look around as though to say, does anyone see this? And then move on, go home.
Later I’m walking home again, and this time it’s dark, and as I walk up the hill I remember the bird, remember that I will have to walk past it again. My stomach tightens and my eyes are scanning the ground for it as I walk, I can’t quite remember the place where it was. It’s so dark out that it’s hard to make out what I’m seeing, and my hands start to make fists which then squeeze tightly as they would if I had a hand in mine to squeeze. Every leaf and twisted vine looks like young innocent death. The first time was a shock but this second time I see it ten times, twenty times, before I see it truly. The second time is by far worse.
Today I was walking home in the light rain and ended up behind a young woman with two little kids. They were in a little chain, the woman holding the hand of the boy, the boy holding the hand of the girl. The kids couldn’t have been more than five, same height, maybe twins, maybe not related at all. The little girl turned to glance and me and then, for some reason, looked back at me a second time. Brown skin, brown curly hair, bright brown eyes, she smiled at me and put up her index finger in something that seemed halfway between the “shhh” gesture and pointing. It looked for all the world like she was a fairy god-child, bestowing a blessing or magical gift on me. And maybe that’s exactly what she meant by the gesture. A spell to make me pretty or wise or happy.
When people are out of your life, for whatever reason, it is this really strange feeling sometimes when you realize that they still exist, that they’re out there in the world having thoughts and feelings and they’re doing something right now, this second, whatever it is. Making dinner or watching tv or writing songs or whatever. And then you have to think about the people that you’ve met but don’t even remember, and they’re having lives too. And all the people you’ve never even met and will never meet, they all have life stories too, and right now a lot of them are really happy and a lot of them are tragic and a lot of them are just doing ordinary things but they are feeling like those things are really important. There are so many narratives in the world.
The truth
I lost my way. I’m hoping to find it again.
looking through my fingers 