As outside observers of the Penn State scandal, it’s easy for us to focus only on the dark side of powerful unifying institutions like the school’s football program. We see at Penn State a loyalty to a team so strong that it seems to warp perspectives. Legendary coaches become beyond reproach. Indefensible negligence becomes media-created distortion. The team’s instrumental value to the university community gets mistaken for intrinsic value; its success becomes a priority in and of itself.
But our criticism of Penn State’s response to the scandal should be couched in an acknowledgement that the nature of our school’s community makes it hard to relate to the Penn State football culture. And that’s a shame.
It’s a shame because the same unity that facilitated last week’s ugly riot in the aftermath of Joe Paterno’s ouster has the power to do great things. For Penn State last Friday, it was a force that brought thousands of students together for a vigil honoring victims of sexual abuse. In the coming weeks and months, that unity will help students move past this awful period. The strong sense of community at the heart of Penn State’s football culture will hold thousands of this year’s graduating seniors together as a family through the rest of their lives. All of those students — even the ones who aren’t football fans — will be better off for it.
Clearly the football culture at Penn State has been problematic — at least at the administrative level. It must be rethought. But it can be and almost always is a force for good. And the fact that Princeton doesn’t have a single comparably unifying institution on its campus is unfortunate.
We’re certainly not united by our athletics. As Dan Feinberg ’13 wrote in a column last month, “there is a divide between Princeton’s varsity athletes and much of the rest of campus.” That’s sad, but it’s generally true. From tailgaters who don’t make it to the games to students who never even get near the stands at any athletic event during their four years here, the school spirit just isn’t widespread when it comes to celebrating sports.
But no one expects Princeton to be a football school. We’re supposed to be an academic community first and foremost. Yet sometimes our academic and political interests pull us apart into split camps — the Center for Human Values versus the James Madison Program, College Republicans versus College Democrats, Tigers for Israel versus the Princeton Committee on Palestine, Anscombe versus SHARE.
Even when we’re not on opposite ends of a debate, our intellectual pursuits rarely bring us together. Academic successes tend to be more personal than public. Research and writing aren’t spectator sports, after all. And even when the achievements of members of the University community are recognized — when our classmates receive fellowships and our professors get Nobel Prizes — it’s hard to take much personal pride in their achievements. No one’s itching to throw economics professors Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims the kind of parade UConn’s basketball team got last year.
Our strongest loyalties are not to the University itself but to the separate communities that exist within it: eating clubs, a cappella, bands, orchestra, political organizations, publications, fraternities and sororities. These groups help us find our bearings on this campus, and our involvement in them is as much a part of our Princeton experience as our theses. But while there’s plenty of overlap between these groups, none of them encompass a broad enough swath of campus to build a more cohesive community.
What Princeton does have are unifying events. And we do those very well. The Nude Olympics are dead and buried, but another campus-wide tradition was resurrected last week with the Orange and Black Ball. Lawnparties give us all two opportunities each year to party together on the Street — no lists, no passes. The thesis gives all seniors a common enemy, even if some departments turn their theses in earlier than others. And, of course, there’s the big kahuna: Reunions — an event so successful at bringing the Princeton community together that some alumni make it back every year.
But events aren’t the same as lasting institutions woven into our day-to-day lives. Even when they succeed at temporarily bringing all the disparate elements of the student body together, the effect is not permanent.
In its report last year, the University’s Working Group on Campus Social and Residential Life was right to recommend that more campus-wide events be created to foster a sense of broader community. But the working group also made a grave error. It misdiagnosed our divided loyalties to the communities that are the heart of campus life for so many — Greek organizations in particular — as a root cause of our fragmented campus culture.
Set the scandal aside. Penn State — a school with a higher percentage of Greek students than Princeton — shows us that this is not a zero-sum conflict. In the stadium, students aren’t defined by their divided affiliations — they’re all Nittany Lions fans.
The problem at Princeton isn’t that the social institutions we have divide us; it’s that there’s a dearth of larger institutions uniting us. Changing that ought to be a top priority for anyone serious about building a more inclusive campus culture here. And for all the flak Penn State’s gotten lately, we could take a page out of its book.
Jacob Reses is a Wilson School major from Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.
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