Pioneer LogLewis & Clark College’s Student-Run Newspaper

Here on the Hill, we have something unique—please don’t force change and spoil it

April 30, 2010

by Natalie Baker, guest writer

Allow me to introduce you to my buddy, Reed—you know, the neighboring college campus whose president has been reprimanded by the Portland Police Bureau, whose annual festival Renn Fayre will now be patrolled by undercover federal agents, and whose troubles were broadcast in the New York Times this week, all because of the school’s issues with lax drug culture. These issues recently came to light (for those who’ve been living under a rock) because of the tragic death of a student via heroin overdose.

And then there’s us, good ol’ Lewis & Clark. While Reed is known for acid and academics, we’re known for Monica Lewinsky and having a pretty campus. Reed is to LC as an out-of-body experience is to enjoying the weather. Yeah, a solid handful of kids here smoke marijuana, that scary and dangerous killer drug that you also fooled around with back in the day. But the students here are doing something special that I like to call “keeping your shit under control.” They read those mind-numbing Chaucer and Huntington assignments, they lend ear to the various intellectuals brought in by our school’s symposia, they throw frisbees, they spit poetry and throw pottery. And when April 20 rolls around, many of them gather at our school’s flag pole to smoke a bowl and take part in something that has become a campus tradition, whether you like it or not.

The administration’s collective scoffing at the 4/20 flagpole tradition is perhaps best compared to many students’ collective scoffing at our administration’s attempt to force athletics-based school spirit down our throats—the difference being that students don’t have the interest or power to send Portland police to our poorly attended, extravagantly funded football games to harass the Division III pigskin-throwing saviors of our college’s reputation and financial situation. Those would be the same pigskin-throwing saviors who quietly receive academic scholarships despite abysmal scholastic achievements (with exasperated tutors as my source, along with particularly eye-opening E&D classroom experiences), since our school technically doesn’t hand out sports scholarships.

While I’m sure that the higher-ups with dollar signs in their eyes love the theory that athletic alumni turn out higher donation rates, someone needs to ask them: to what end? Lewis & Clark has something unique going on, and it is time that the administration embraced it. Instead of being a cookie-cutter institutional excuse for Greek life, sports hysteria, alcohol poisoning and uselessly overpopulated goldfish intelligence level classes, our school attracts smart, progressive kids who are tired of mainstream culture’s unsatisfying lifestyle and mindset. Imagine the impact of investing in their creative and intellectual capacities instead of falling over yourselves to pamper the Detroit Lions’ third string fullbacks of tomorrow. Sit in on a class or eat a meal in the cafeteria and you’ll notice something: Our school is becoming divided. How many of your new “desirable” undergraduates go to student-produced theater productions, concerts and poetry readings? How many of them hang out in the co-op? How many of them (willingly) attend the Environmental or Gender Studies Symposium? How many of them participate in student government?

I started this with Reed, so that’s how I’ll end it. Reed College is an example of an institution with a drug problem. Lewis & Clark is not. Because of this, I firmly believe that the administration’s overzealous targeting of students on 4/20, with the unnecessary assistance of Portland police, is only one instance of a larger effort by our school’s authorities to manipulate our institution’s reputation and student body into just another uninspired, athletics-obsessed cash cow. As if we needed another one of those.