Control and Randomness
How Do we Know When to Control
College students vs Authority is a debate as old as time. For some reason, the administration has a distinct distaste for the property damage and lawsuits that students are prone to cause. Students, on the other hand, have limited time to make youthful, spur of the moment mistakes. Maybe they stole a chicken for a scavenger hunt (don’t worry, they gave it back unharmed the next day), or maybe they found a sign on campus, dug it up, and gave it a new home in their dorm room. Either way, there are some conflicts between authority and college students, and I think it’s definitely changed over time.
I hear about the pranks that Mudd students used to pull: buying pigs and releasing them in the Scripps Dining Hall, shooting watermelons using surgical wire (shooting it so far that it accidentally hit someone on a bike on a different campus). And all of this I don’t think admin would even come close to letting us do now. As time passes, safety regulations improve, and administration starts getting in more trouble when things happen.
So what ends up happening? We go from students creating long term, nostalgic stories (like using chemistry and a hatred for shiny metal to rust an ugly statue overnight) to students not doing anything and losing some of the culture. Admin takes advantage of the nostalgic stories, and brags about its prank culture and student body, but doesn’t acknowledge that the student body has been prevented from forming new stories.
I would say that control makes sense, especially as you notice how a lack of control could harm people. Maybe laws have changed since the 60s (they definitely have), and so we just can’t afford to allow people to be put in danger anymore. But maybe we also don’t allow for enough randomness now. Maybe we focus on controlling small things, that have little impact, that don’t need to be focused on. But we should really start considering as well how the climate around randomness has changed, and maybe its just a fact that we can’t afford to be as “random” as we were before.
I don’t have a consensus on it, and I think no one really does. It’s something that has to be decided on as a society, an acclimation of individuals and experiences. So I’ll leave this one up in the air, and let this blog post serve as a conversation starter.