I logged onto Facebook the other night. A student I used to tutor posted a link to an article in the Star Ledger about the party-turned-riot in New Brunswick, spearheaded by tons of Rutgers students. As I hope most level-headed students were, I was disgusted. As I read through the article, one quote stood out to me,
“It’s college,” a sophomore was quoted as saying in order to downplay the incident. “Live a little.”
I graduated Rutgers in May 2012. Over the past year, I’ve been living and working in New York City. I’m a public schoolteacher in the Bronx and Master’s Degree candidate at Brooklyn College. All of my colleagues know I am a Rutgers graduate. All of my twelve and thirteen-year-old students know I went to Rutgers. My dermatologist knows I went to Rutgers. Even the fucking barista at my local Starbucks knows I went to Rutgers because I cannot stop talking about how much I love Rutgers.
With all my love and passion for my alma mater, people are often surprised to hear that I had never been to a single football or basketball game nor had I ever been to a frat party. I never even lived on campus and yet, I value that institution for everything it’s bestowed upon me. I do this because I was a part of the Rutgers the public hasn’t seen—it was the Rutgers that could have top high-school seniors eager and excited (instead of disappointed or reluctant) to attend. The Rutgers I knew is the Rutgers that statistics show—a top research university with exceptional programs, a hugely diverse class of students, and professors who will challenge and stimulate you every day. I knew this school, and I loved this school.
Though I’d never lived on campus and never went to a football game, I was nothing but involved. I was an English major and a Religion minor. I studied abroad in England during the spring semester of my junior year. I was a First Year Interest Group Seminar instructor and a tutor at the Plangere Writing Center where I worked up to twenty hours a week. My friends were writers, actors, and activists. They were Persian international students, aspiring doctors, and engineers. They were even the students I tutored, who came from New Jersey and all over the world, and my FIGS kids who I adored and constantly kept in touch with. Most of all, we were what university students should be: young people who loved to learn and who were committed to learning.
When I think of Rutgers, I think of waking up and buying a coffee at Au Bon Pain before showing up to tutor Expos students at the Plangere Writing Center. I think of my favorite professor, hosting his students and serving tea to them in his office on Thursday afternoons, while we talked books, movies, and anything else we might have been dealing with. I think of the students I had when I was a FIGS instructor—and how much I enjoyed mentoring them and seeing their success as college students. I think of my Shakespeare seminar and how six or seven of us would go to dinner every Monday after class to extend our class discussions and just bond over our common interests.
Fun was my Advanced Creative Writing class and the Friday and Saturday nights we spent in the Easton Ave apartments, enjoying ourselves as young people should but with basic human decency. I had fun by watching my best friend perform on stage and being introduced to the vibrant theatre community at Rutgers. Crazy fun was even the nights that turned into mornings at a friend’s house off College Ave, which served as the mecca for all of us on the weekends. I was a normal social student, who would still walk to my best friend’s house after a night of parties and fall asleep at six AM. We would still get “breakfast” at one PM and still laugh and date and drive around aimlessly and be free.
But through all this fun, I never had a friend be so wasted that he or she couldn’t walk. I never had a friend be so stupid that he or she would throw bottles at an officer in the midst of a riot (as if we would ever even find ourselves in one), because even then, as late teenagers and early twenty-somethings, we were all aware that intelligent people didn’t do these things. We were aware that we were at a university—and a good one at that—to find ourselves and to deepen ourselves in our chosen fields so we could become better people and actually give something back to the world. Isn’t that life after all? To discover yourself, find your path, and excel in your passion with like-minded friends by your side? Is there any greater joy or purpose than that?
So I don’t understand what the sophomore at the so-called Delafest was saying when she said,
“It’s college. Live a little.”
Because I don’t know what about those disgusting videos and behavior is living—and it has nothing to do with the Rutgers I knew.
Rutgers was my bubble of intellectualism and joy. It’s a tragedy that bright kids who love to learn could be dissuaded from attending because of a misunderstanding of what it means to really live.
Nadia Kardan, Concerned Alumna