Examining unmet expectations from a student’s point of view

As the year comes to a close, many of us are isolated: quarantined and separated from the college we lived in and learned in and partied in. It’s time to break down barriers and wrestle with the fact that Wofford has failed us.

When we came to Wofford it was because we wanted to build, to move forward, to create something of ourselves and to grow from the people we were in high school. We wanted to experience freedom and individualism and to make the jump from childhood into adulthood among our peers and take off into the real world. Wofford let us down. 

Wofford let us down because it is not the place “where thought leads” or where “your world” means anything. We all put in the work, we took the right classes, and we banked everything on the next semester in hopes that things would get better. Soon we found we were wrong.

Instead of coming to a place of growth and individualism we found an ugly box-like conformity, a bubble that requires an escape, instead of a new adventure and the next chapter in our lives. 

Sports dominate the news and activities, fraternities and sororities control social politics and everyone has a group. Everyone needs a group to fit in the bubble. Religion and conservatism are center stage in most people’s minds. I’m not talking about political conservatism, I couldn’t care less for politics; I’m talking about anti-progressivism: an insistence on the natural order and the “way things always were.” Immobility. 

Each year, new students come in and are divided into boxes, or left on the outside. Most people don’t even know it’s happening. They pat themselves on the back, join a club, rush, say they’re having a good time, and then make offhand jokes about the Wofford bubble, or how much stress they’re under. They never stop to ask if they’re happy, really happy. They don’t even realize they’ve lost the best part of themselves, the only part that mattered. 

We were promised change. We were promised progressivism, and a real launch into our lives, hope for a future we could change. What kind of place is it, what kind of college, that crushes people into popular molds instead of celebrating their individuality?

These people, the good Wofford students, struggle through classes just to get to the football game and the weekend, then they drink until sixty thousand dollars a year seems like an acceptable entry fee for the experience. They wear their Wofford hoodies, wave their Wofford flags and do shots out of Wofford glasses so that when they wake up the next morning, they can call their sickness a hangover, the ill feeling of stress in their stomach just a bad trip. 

And yet, we’re still here. The disillusioned. We broke the veneer and didn’t quit, didn’t transfer, didn’t give up, maybe to prove a point. Maybe that point is that there is another Wofford—the Wofford that President Samhat sells and believes in. Sometimes we can catch a glimpse of that Wofford when we talk to the right professor, when we talk to the right student, when we’re in class and people care, people want us to learn, they want us to win. Now, without class, we see more clearly.

Maybe that’s why we keep going, that’s why we’re still here. Because it’ll take a chunk out of us, but sometimes it gives a little back too, and sometimes that’s worth it. 

I’m not drawing attention to Wofford’s failure because I want attention or because I want you all to say, “oh, that’s just one case,” or “oh, most students don’t feel that way.” I wouldn’t write this if I was the one case, or if I didn’t have hope. I would transfer. 

I’m writing this because I believe in us, and I believe that when things are back to normal, when we return to Wofford, hopefully we will ask ourselves the real questions. We will know something was wrong, we will see what really happened, and try to fix it. Our time away will make us understand the importance of face-to-face interactions.

Uncovering the second Wofford takes time, and it takes patience. But when we make the decision to seek it out, we may find it was the only reason we were here in the first place, and it’s the reason we’ll be back. 

Written by Anonymous