I couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but something about the Hungry Games orientation week festivities felt off, like a pebble in my shoe that I could feel but never actually find when I got home, exhausted from volunteering. All the usual elements were there, the jerseys, the low-budget pageantry, hoarse voices, and all the usual tralala we’ve come to expect, but this year lacked something crucial.
I came to Carleton a bright-eyed and boozy-tailed first-year and I’ve been involved in some capacity every orientation week since. It’s hard to explain, but the spirit wasn’t there this year, it felt more like a parade of fake smiles backed by unreasonable expectations to create a world that for the first time didn’t feel real.
“I used to tell frosh that regardless of the fact that it seemed lame at first, it was totally worth coming out to everything, and I meant every word. This was the first year I felt like I was lying to them,” a friend confessed to me.
This is no reflection on the superb organization, but rather on the state of orientation week as a dwindling and convoluted institution that got a facelift in the wrong direction somewhere along the way. The week has become an unrealistic bastardization of everything it used to stand for. We make students watch a play about the trials of university life then don’t give them condoms. We tell them about adult decisions then reprimand them for taking part in the same synched social stupidities that make university an experience rather than an experiment.
It’s not all wrong, the commitment to creating a safe space on campus right from the get-go is incredible, but sometimes the icing effect of a strictly enforced policy of political correctness gets out of hand. Facilitators and volunteers were forced to preach sobriety at all costs, chastised for saying “fuck” aloud or just generally caught between a rock and a make-believe university Utopia imagined by the administration.
“Frosh is for the frosh, we want them to feel happy and welcome,” I heard repeated like a mantra all week.
But making them feel welcome in a fictitious, colourful world of white-washed chants and anthropomorphic food serves only to further disorient the students you’re claiming to acclimatize. What used to be a week of harsh adjustments and self-discovery is now a watered-down pseudo-summer camp sleepaway adventure where every eye is blind and more than a few are turned, I’m just not sure in which direction.
Maybe it’s the war-torn “Save Frosh Week” T-shirt hanging in our den, but maybe it’s time for the CUSA and the Student Experience Office to meet for dinner somewhere public, order a quick appetizer and admit that it’s just not working out.
I dream of CUSA/RRRA smelling the coffee and going back to frosh basics somewhere off campus. It’ll be dirty, impolite and probably offensive as all hell, but it would be ours. I’m sick of pretending like the kids are all right; they’re not, but at least we made peace with that a long time ago.
David Meffe
Fourth-year journalism
