Imagine you are one in a crowd of 1,000 students running all over campus and trying to herd, in different directions, a ball larger than a small car. Imagine jumping on cars, climbing trees and scrambling up fences to hit the ball in your desired direction. Imagine the ball breaking and ripping into pieces as your peers wrestle for every last remaining section. Imagine you're having a ball (pun intended), and you're excited to be part of something larger than yourself. Imagine an overwhelming sense of pride and spirit toward your group and your school. I don't have to imagine this story. I lived it.
This past weekend, I visited my girlfriend at Yale University. On the phone, she often spoke of her residential college, a foreign concept to me as a Hopkins student. She explained all students are assigned to a residential college, with which they are associated for their four years as undergraduates. The vast majority of students choose to live in their residential college all four years. Each college has its own housing, dining hall, courtyard, mascot, cheer and apparel.
Sundays are "Family Night," when undergraduates essentially must eat in their college's dining hall, but most end up eating there on a regular basis throughout the week. Intramural sports games pit colleges against one another as they compete for the Tyng cup. The system seems like something out of a Harry Potter novel.
Every autumn at Yale, colleges competed in an annual game of Bladder Ball. In 1982, it was banned due to instances of property damage and injuries, but when I arrived, my girlfriend told me that the infamous Bladder Ball game was allegedly back on.
Bladder Ball, as I was told, involved a giant ball, seven feet in diameter, being thrown into the middle of campus at 4pm; each college was to get the ball into its courtyard. Once the ball was there, the game was over. That's it. No other rules. Get the ball to your courtyard.
So there I was, standing on Old Campus at 3:45 on a brisk fall afternoon with my girlfriend and 1,000 other eager students. People were cheering and stretching, heckling and drinking, but there was one question on everyone's mind: Would this ball show up?
Then we saw it: a multicolored, oversized, rubber ball. Like ants playing 'keep-up' with a beach ball, students guided the ball into the streets, and the masses followed.
It sailed up and down the busy Elm Street, toward one particular college, and then back out to the street. The police came and tried fruitlessly to intervene, three cops trying to control 1,000 students. They managed to get one lane cleared, but the ball was hit back and the students returned. Some students stood off to the side and snapped pictures with their phones, while others fought, shoved and shouted for the ball. People alternated between chanting for their college and chanting "f--- Harvard." The ball ripped, but each piece was fought over; students still wanted to bring the remains to their homes. At the same time, despite the chaos, students remained considerate. If someone fell down, another would scream "stop," and the crowd would back off. But overall the event seemed to be a frenzied mess of college students.
Bladder Ball taught me something fundamental about students at Yale. They want to be there. They want to participate, they want to get excited, and they want to and do love their school. They feel invested in something larger than themselves, because they feel connected to Yale through their residential colleges. What's more, they shift seamlessly from intra-school spirit to inter-school spirit. One makes the other contagious. At the end of the day, the competition did not make students antagonistic toward one another; instead, it united them under the banner of Yalie camaraderie.
One finds this camaraderie everywhere. At Yale's Hillel, after singing the Grace after the Meal, students sing the Yale fight song. I wouldn't even recognize Hopkins's song, yet my girlfriend has Yale's memorized in both Hebrew and English.
What surprises me more than the fact that Yalies know the song is that they chose to invest their time in learning it. My girlfriend may care about her school more than any Hopkins student that I know, but I know others from various schools with far more pride than she does.
Even though Bladder Ball certainly did involve some degree of recklessness, damage and injury, and perhaps there should be restrictions on it, the idea that Hopkins would have to put restraints on school spirit is really quite laughable.
At Hopkins, the Student Government Association (SGA) tried to organize a candle-lighting ceremony, a new tradition on the lower Quad, during the first week of school. Attendees around me, however, approached the ceremony with cynicism and apathy.
Even as a pre-frosh at Hopkins, I recognized the inferiority complex that students experience. I was told that Hopkins is a place for Ivy League rejects, that many students had an eye on a bigger prize, and that we chose Hopkins as a second or third choice.
We let this mindset ruin our perception of a school that ranks higher than almost every other school in the country. However, what is worse than our inferiority complex? We continuously confirm and perpetuate the Hopkins stereotype. Hopkins students are generally too busy with work to care about anything else. As a student body, we work hard, but I guarantee you that students at other universities work just as hard. Walk the halls of the freshman dorms at Columbia and you find students debating the Iliad or the Odyssey at length. Almost every senior at Princeton slaves over the senior thesis.
Yet, for some reason, we give our work habits an unworthy amount of attention. Our work burdens us. Students from other schools care about their work just as much as we do; they just care about their school more.
What is it about Hopkins that makes us apathetic toward the institution as a whole? Is it the hesitation to support the Hopkins community? Is it the lack of enthusiasm for our sports teams, including our supposedly-beloved lacrosse? The act of cheering on school teams unifies universities 10 times our size.
Is it the fact that we do not have a residential college system to unite us through intra-college spirit? Or as freshmen do we observe the upperclassmen's indifference toward our community and take on that attitude oureslves? As a freshman, I mistakenly learned that no cares about community, and even worse, that no one should care.
Hopkins students need a change in attitude. We need to realize that we should be proud to be here and teach people to be proud. We need to invest and teach investment, belong and teach belonging, care and teach caring. But most of all, we need a Bladder Ball.
