Walls

Studying in a university with a student culture like La Salle’s can be overwhelming for the unprepared. So many student groups – all with varying cultures – can get one swallowed up in the thick of an organization’s activities, with new friends to make and people to meet, sometimes more than one can care to really think about.

Students have a need to associate and to belong, to be accepted and acknowledged by their peers. Being swept up in such groups is a natural phenomenon for many students who want to broaden their horizons and know more people over the course of their college life, from different backgrounds and different courses.

This tightly knit sense of association with each other is something common in many student orgs, regardless of whether the org has 50 members or 4,500. It is a sense of association that is founded on various reasons, not all of them examined or consciously willed for that matter.

Even before I paid the confirmation fee of DLSU, I had already been approached by a prominent student organization to become a member. Even if I did not have any clear idea as to what exactly I was getting myself into, I was keen to maximize my stay in college and not to forego opportunities, so I said yes to membership in the org.

I left the org even before the first term ended because I did not see any reason to stay. I did not see what idea bound the members other than a desire to associate, as if it were an association for the sake of associating and not an association fueled by a desire to impact others. But the org’s members were so fervently loyal to it that I myself did not see the real foundations of such loyalty beyond emotional fervor and ‘support’.

I don’t think the org that recruited me back then is the only one with so devout a membership. A lot of organizations have names associated to the courses from where majority of their members stem, and there are offices in student government and other executive teams and student clusters whose members are bound not by the group’s mission but by people, personalities and concrete individual experiences, a loyalty founded more on emotions and exceptional moments than ideas and a perception of communion in mission.

Unfortunately, unexamined mission statements, unexamined bylaws and principles upon which orgs were founded are not the exception but a common predicament for student organizations. It becomes more challenging when the noble principles upon which organizations were founded become lost over the course of a status quo left unquestioned, where the organization’s leaders fail to exercise critical thinking in favor of mere discretion’s expediency.

Potential issues may surface when the members of these associations become blinded by the fealty that they profess for their org as a result of emotions and relationships and not ideas and principles. It becomes an irrational fixation that may hinder smooth collaboration and even engender conflict with other orgs, particularly if said org is a unit in the student government, wherein harmony and collaboration is essential to meeting its function of operating as a united student government.

Despite adamant proclamations from all these groups of having their members prioritize being students first, inevitably, the most rabid followers of these orgs – students – lose themselves, and cease to see their purpose and function as students in a University environment, associating themselves more with the idea of being part of a smaller society, which holds little clout with the rest of the world.

One forgets one’s responsibility in the bigger scheme of things with the small town kind of mindset which objectively would have no place in a University, where ideas are universal and students are supposed to be open to learning instead of confining themselves to small unguided circles, shutting themselves off to reason as early as now.

Unfortunately this kind of parochialism, left unchecked, stretches on to larger contexts. One’s exaggerated focus over one’s small group does not just serve as a barrier to real collaboration but also implicitly severs one’s genuine communion in mission with the rest of the community.

Students, whether members, officers or presidents of organizations, need to recognize that to be truly in communion with the Lasallian mission – the understanding of which is another question altogether – one needs to stop thinking small and start looking at one’s role as a member of the institution. The obligation of Lasallians to be the critical thinkers that ELGAs paint them out to be starts not when they graduate but even in how they associate within the University, and whether or not they see reason or socially relevant principles in why they mobilize and form and organize.

Student orgs, executive teams, student government units, media and cultural groups should operate following a sound mission, fueled by the ideas and principles that will serve society not only after graduation but as early as now.

The walls of La Salle are a comforting illusion of separation from a world to which Lasallians are accountable as nation-builders. This accountability is easy to forget, especially when an individual graduates from being swept up in the status quo of unexamined mission, to becoming the person who is responsible for enforcing it in a failure to discern the purpose of association and the purpose of mobilizing student power.