As a guilty pleasure I've always been a sucker for things like News of the Weird and university police blotters. When no one's looking, I'll set aside the mourning for our nation's social problems and salivate over a good episode of COPS on CourtTV. Having a look at someone else's problems is entertaining, even a bit therapeutic.
Occasionally, the problems of a community can take a strange turn, like the arrest of an affluent housewife on prostitution charges, or a car full of Eagle Scouts busted for trying to score a sackful of something bad at one of the drive-by drug stores scattered across America's ghettos. University blotters routinely run stories of the kid who got hypothermia while running across campus naked on acid, or the dormroom that was searched because of bad smells wafting out, only to discover a menagerie of miserable iguanas, boas, hamsters and guinea pigs.
For a conoisseur of this sort of information, these edgy tidbits are entirely absent from the Emory University student paper, the Wheel. Unlike their unoriginal and uninspired (though well-written) columns on world events, or the vapid (though descriptive) articles on the hardships of "hooking up" on campus, this is not the editor's fault. The ugly truth is that there is no edge at this school. The Emory police blotter has the usual thefts of expensive laptops, the weekly occurance of some 19 year old kid who gets woken up by campus cops passed out on a picnic bench, or the guy who got a ticket for driving in an area off-limits to private vehicles, and that's it.
For me, the impact of this problem is negligible. I am a graduate student, safely isolated most of the time on the far end of campus, surrounded by a cohort of like-minded (though diverse) public health students. But I love the Emory School of Public Health, and am thankful for the opportunities that the university as a whole has granted me. I believe that a lot of new, positive energy to our nation's university research and theoretical base can come from its expansion, but I am afraid they're missing something crucial: interesting kids.
Here is an actual entry from the Emory blotter:
A 19-year-old female student reported property damage on Oct. 19 at 11:30 a.m. She was attending an event at the corner of Asbury Rd. and Dickie Dr. An Emory First Responder unit was parked on the street, and when it drove away it rolled over a $1,700 Burberry bag. Inside the bag was a $60 Chanel eyeglass case and a $2 Arizona iced tea. Damage to the bag included black tire marks. The student incurred a small injury trying to remove the broken iced tea bottle from the bag.
Emory is a school with at three towering cranes on its horizon, a series of five- ten- and twenty-year plans, and one of the biggest endowments out there. Its schools of medicine and the sciences, business and law are all at the top of their game. The undergraduate program offers a number of exciting opportunities and tracks beyond the standard liberal arts model, such as pre-nursing, public health, pre-law, and an undergraduate business school. The facilities are world-class; walking across campus for the first time, I was amazed at the overall beauty of the place. Emory recently recruited Salman Rushdie to a 5-year appointment, and is going through the motions of transforming itself from a very good school to a top-ten Harvard-Princeton-Yale institution. But I think there's something they're missing in all of this.
Go to Harvard, Columbia or Cornell, and you'll see students who look like they have something to say, something to contribute. You'll see kids with some identity beyond the AP classes they took, their golf game, or the soccer team the made. You'll see kids in black-rimmed glasses, kids who look like they're in a rock band, or like they have some identity beyond cold preppy superiority, or the desperately polished dancing bear act many performed to get into a good college, and through imprinting, cannot stop now to save their life.
Go to one of the Ivys and you'll see big scarry lesbians, militant African American kids with dreads and dark sunglasses, waify artists, mad scientists and tortured intellectuals. These categories are almostly entirely missing at Emory. Even though kids from all of these schools come from the same background (myself included, though there wasn't a snowball's chance in Georgia of them taking me out of high school)-- the overeducated and extremely affluent, it seems like Emory made the play only for the ones who wear baseball caps and polo shirts (male of female).
Emory undergrads care more about money and are more likely to flaunt it than their peers. Regardless of whether the average Emory parent can afford it over the average Cornell parent, their kids are more likely to be given the keys to a new BMW SUV with Connecticut tags, and to slam the door with confidence as they pull up to their dorm, strutting in new designer jeans. These kids need to be exposed to others, to be called out on their boring tastes, or else they'll grow up to be as shallow and conformist as their clothes and cars profess. Emory needs some edginess before it will ever generate anything remotely close to the intellectual energy of its older, more distinguished competitors.
As part of their ambitious planning process, Emory's administration needs to think a little less about money and a little more about culture, or they'll never break the top ten.
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