October 09, 2003

The Collective Attention Span...

This kind of came to mind because of what Randy put up...

Did you know that quite a few of the trees and structures on this campus are memorials to someone or another? Over this summer Sam and I were working Phys. Plant and got to clean out the basement of old Student Services... and we found several things that had been tossed off there. I seem to remember Sam even going over and running into Dr. Graff about a memorial plaque for one of the old MIR's here... but ask him about that.

Long story short, this institution has a criminally short attention span. To be fair, it is the nature of educational institutions to forget a lot... as a friend of mine put it, "if something hasn't been relevant in the last 2 years or is done for two years, for all that half the people on campus know that is the way that it's always been, and after 4 years only a handfull of people will remember beyond the common memory." Of course, this shouldn't be true at LU. Unfortunately, it is the habit of this place that we are so busy looking ahead that we hardly have a grasp on where we are, much less where we've been. Again, the typical myopia of a University... but that's not an excuse.

I just think of a really good friend I've lost and how many others this school has seen have their time cut short, and I wonder if anything would be different if we tried a little harder to remember. I wish we were more concerned about their memories than about the newest attempt to put screws in some old man for his money to build a new hunk of concrete on campus...

Posted by Vengeful Cynic at October 9, 2003 02:21 AM