Whether you hail from a summer spent on distant shores or you have the ability to be a speedy car ride away from Boston University’s sprawling campus, the feeling that consumes all of us is one and the same. A cocktail of anxiety, excitement, and anticipation is topped off with an explosive sense of immediacy. You walk Bay State Road with caution, fearing for your life as your eyes are blinded by the fluorescent yellow carts being pushed wildly along the sidewalks. The whole scene is bathed in a hazy glow as returning students are seen staring blankly at the renovated building signs with their neat, white font. A literal clean slate. How we long to see those chipped gold painted letters once more. Strolling down the Comm. Ave Fair that lured in doe-eyed freshmen and vulture-like upperclassmen with the promise of free merchandise, it felt fantastic to be surrounded once more by an array of both complete strangers and friends. While each and every one of us finds ourselves drawn here for a myriad of reasons, we all know one gain that remains a certainty: we flock here to procure an education.
The realm of academia, much like any other, has undergone dramatic alterations. Like a statue being pelted by rain, the ultimate values and goals of learning have been shaped by the downpour of political debate and a changing economic landscape. These factors have ensured that limits of education are stretched even further. Whether it is army generals in Latin America suddenly attaining master’s degrees from business schools, or Kate Middleton being trained in the art of etiquette by a team of experts, the quest for knowledge is a dramatically different endeavor.
It should come as no surprise that academia has now delved into the study of Internet memes. For those of you who are baffled by this jargon, a meme is an idea, or oftentimes a satirical picture or poster that is propelled into infamy by the Internet. On the surface, one would think that this was the ultimate paradox to the stereotype of dusty books and fine print that we associate with higher education. Think again. TIME magazine’s Megan Gibson discovered a female graduate student at the London School of Economics who is completing her degree in Media and Communications, with a concentration on memes, fulfilling her passion for LOLcats: hundreds of images that illustrate cat jokes. Nevertheless, these deceptively shallow images have been the source of soaring advertising revenue and psychological intrigue. Yet again, we have managed to catapult the spread of information onto an entirely new playing field, taking alongside it the complexion of serious education.
Perhaps traditionalists, who believe that the sanctity of research should be saved for the forays into more conventional outlets, will be slamming their heads against the oak-panelled walls of their studies in disbelief at what constitutes higher learning in our generation. Yet, where would we be as a society or as an inquisitive human race if we limited our exploration to what is deemed ‘worthy’? Without a creative streak in our learning, social networking may never have entered our lives, the websites’ constant changes and add-ons frying our brains in new and painstakingly innovative ways. Should we never have expanded our horizons, a novelty such as the museum devoted to celebrating the history of Cup Noodles would have never existed as a haven for the grateful college student to visit in Japan, reminiscing about its sustenance in the early hours of morning.
We have all gathered here, armed with our mattress pads, our laundry bags and an influx of Boston University outerwear we got carried away with purchasing at Barnes and Noble, to obtain an education that will drive us to ameliorate the world we have cultivated for so many centuries. A report recently emerged that the United States Justice Department spent an obscene $4,200 on a mere 250 muffins for a conference: attendees were dining on $16 muffins. In the subsequent audit report that uncovered these luxuries, the report writers’ only comment was that this purchase appeared to be ‘very costly’. It is instances like these where you can’t help but wonder if the possibility of a new approach to education, particularly mathematics, may be a viable option that we ought to contemplate more seriously.
Walking through the George Sherman Union, I brave the Link tables filled with student groups valiantly promoting a diverse range of causes and events to the daily human traffic that barrels along in the afternoon. I see other groups of students huddled around laptops brainstorming new ideas or trying to decipher old ones they were presented with in their previous lecture. The atmosphere tingles with the electricity of minds swinging back into action after four months in hibernation. I’m confident that we have the aptitude to rid conferences nationwide of $16 muffins. Let’s hope we don’t disappoint.
Sofiya Mahdi is a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences and a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at sofiya21@bu.edu.
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