Trapping an elusive spirit

“The mere athlete is brutal and philistine, the mere intellectual unstable and spiritless. The right education must tune the strings of the body and mind to perfect spiritual harmony.” — Plato

Brandishing a free T-shirt from something called Columbia College Days, a friend joined me in Butler Library, where I was reading “Crime and Punishment.” Ah, College Days! That explained the thumping “Electric Feel” remix from the morning, which had been the sound track for my walk from John Jay to Butler. Silently, without decamping from the library, I began my research.

College Days, since its inauguration in 2002, has encompassed events from Dean’s Day to the King’s Ball to Days on Campus for prospective students. The goal is to promote school spirit, which is notoriously lacking here at Columbia. Wikipedia reports, “In 2005, they forgot to hold College Days. No one noticed.” In 2010, they remembered—did anyone notice?

My peers and predecessors on Spectator have long considered the matter of Columbia’s “school spirit.” Matt Velazquez wrote last year, “When the members of each new class walk through the gates for the first time, they are Columbians, not Lions,” while “at other colleges, students are branded Blue Devils, Bruins, Tar Heels, Huskies, etc. from the minute they are accepted.” He continues to suggest that school spirit would be improved if the mascot were changed from the lion to the cassowary, a bird indigenous to New Guinea.

Though unusually imaginative in his solution, Velazquez fits into the trend of school spirit reformers, who look to Columbia’s infrastructure for a quick fix. If the mascot were different, more people would be inspired. If the football field were closer to campus, surely there would be more spectators. If the teams won more often, if there were more incentives, prizes, performances. Some will contend that Columbia has plenty of spirit. Others—and I have often counted myself as part of this camp—do not see it.

Whether we believe in “more” or “less” school spirit, perhaps we should analyze its significance before seeking to solve the immediate problem. As it turns out, school spirit has found itself to be the subject of much deserved attention in the field of anthropology. Robert Wenkert and Hanan C. Selvin published a paper in a University of California’s periodical, titled “School Spirit in the Context of a Liberal Education,” where they wrote, “‘school spirit’ is an ambiguous term. It may refer to almost any kind of individual behavior or organized activity on a college campus.”

They proceeded to collect data at Berkeley, to find out who possessed this elusive spirit and locate its origins, based on factors from attendance at sporting events to newspaper readership to school government voting. As it turned out, students living closer to campus demonstrated overwhelmingly higher school spirit by these standards. Married students and commuters showed hardly any.

The source of spirit, gleaned from the research of Wenkert and Selvin, or from any evening at a sports bar, is locality. Its relationship with school spirit is unsurprising for anyone who has pored over maps of Bororo villages or memorized kinship diagrams, or for a devoted fan of the Yankees, the Saints, or the Lakers. Outside of March Madness betting pools, the average person has no vested material interest in his or her team’s victory—local spirit transcends self-interest or “reasonable” behavior. Furthermore, considering the national anthem or nationalism itself, locality accounts for our feelings of loyalty and allegiance.

Following the Berkeley researchers, let’s use sporting events as a model. One explanation is that the organized sporting event has replaced the heroic battle in our social consciousness. Imagine New York and Boston as Medieval warring factions, complete with their crests and symbols, colors and mascots. Even since the ancient Greek Olympics, games have served as war proxies where two sides fight to prove local superiority. Another idea is that communities unite at sporting events to fight local wars with an ideological, internal bent. The film “Remember the Titans” exemplifies this, as T.C. Williams High School unites Alexandria, Virginia, in supporting racial equality.

The question follows: what’s wrong with our locality, that we lack this impulse to “defend” it, to unite in fighting for it?

Perhaps, finding the solution to Columbia’s school spirit “problem” must begin with the study of how we Columbians interpret our locality in forming identity. Students have been known to rally ideologically over a war protest rather than a war proxy. Our “primal scream” is a tradition for reading week, not Homecoming. For sporting events as well as institutions like College Days, the question is not so much how to fix Columbia’s infrastructure of school spirit, but how to find and harness the forces that unite Columbia students in a community-driven way.

Amanda Gutterman is a Columbia College first year with an intended major in anthropology or comparative literature and society. The Far-Side runs alternate Tuesdays.