What’s up McGill, are you mad at me, babe? Because you’re being shady as hell. Listen, I love you. I’ve loved you since the moment I visited your campus back in, what, 2008? With my mom? Remember that day? It was March, but you looked amazing – all sun glinting on snow. My first September as a student with you was incredible – you were ivy-walled and red-bricked and full of new opportunities. Now I feel like you have a bad attitude. It’s not that I hate you, it’s more that you seem to expect me to hate everything and communicate that hate via gif in order to function here. I understand that a lot has been going on lately to stress you out – these few years have been like the Wizard of Oz feat. floods and riots and strikes in place of comparatively manageable wild animals. Students have been either outspokenly furious or begrudging and frustrated. Our online community cyclically gets inflamed by under-informed, overzealous rage and defiled by comment threads that run on a tankful of vitriol and bullshit. It’s all justifiable – I understand that our student community has to engage with its issues and is doing so in a way that reflects the norms and identity of our generation. Good. Still, I can’t help but feel that when I graduate this year, it’ll be with an eye-rolling, exasperated, non-partisan, negativity fatigue.
I balance two versions of McGill in my mind. One of them is my initial perception, and likely the perception I’ll maintain post-grad and for the rest of my life. This version of McGill is not inaccurate, but nicely idealized – you know, it’s a prestigious institution with centuries of history and a great reputation full of genuinely wonderful people I was lucky enough to meet. Then, there’s the McGill informed by all the little discoveries I made here over my undergraduate years. I don’t know what McGill’s official slogan is but if I had to guess based on my experiences I’d say it was some guy yelling “boooo.” It’s difficult being day-to-day proud of my affiliation with a campus on which literally everyone has a massive, debilitating hang up about greeting each other. Four years and I didn’t learn French but I’m highly versed in passive-aggression.
Trust me, I understand the irony of essentially griping about people griping, but I think the observation that McGill is getting a bad attitude has become so pervasive that addressing it is warranted. I can’t help but feel that my 4th year blues are representative of a lot of people’s experiences at McGill.
It’s like when you walk into a packed SSMU lounge and everyone sprawls out over as large a surface area as possible, ensuring that a couch originally designed for three asses now is only suitable for one, one total freakin’ ass. This person will likely be eyeing you shadily as you glance around, all while they’re tweeting something ostensibly funny in that now totally played out “awkwardly anti-social” genre of humour, like: “Don’t even DARE sit next to me, tho #cantdealwithotherpeople,” sending it out into the twitterverse like anyone actually gives a shit. I can’t think of anything more contrived than being a self-involved brat in 2013. Especially at McGill. Carve out a new identity for yourself, for God’s sake. Can we collectively move past thinking being venomously introverted reads as aloof and charming? You know what’s charming? Moving your shit and offering someone the seat next to you every once in a while.
I feel like it would be unfair to pin this all on the student populace because anyone who’s ever dealt with McGill bureaucracy certainly knows that they’re no bucket of gumdrops either. God help you if need any sort of extra attention. God help your credit transfers. They’ve certainly earned their share of bad-vibe blame. But really, if there’s one arena at McGill most responsible for the epidemic of nastiness, it’s our online community. I mean, obviously. It’s the universal niche of pseudo-anonymous douchiness, but it’s also an accessible ground for students to publish, share, and create. Montreal has a wonderful reputation of being a city that’s super conducive to burgeoning young artists, and McGill students need our online community as a stomping ground for self-expression and self-discovery and assorted attempts at artistic experimentation. Not to be all “think of the children,” but there are first years flooding into this institution looking for ways to tentatively reach out and do something new, and basically finding that every McGill organization comes with its own very vocal hate club (“The Daily’s stupid! The Trib’s boring! Leacock’s didn’t publish my article and is now a catchall for my personal insecurities!”). Of course, at some point people need to thicken their skins and realize that whatever they put into the public domain is going to be up for harsh scrutiny, and in the real world, nobody’s gonna be nice about your mistakes. But as we all love to self-indulgently remind ourselves, university isn’t quite the real world yet, it’s a place to try things you’re not necessarily good at yet so you can learn and grow, and if we’re collectively dissuading people from doing so, we’re contributing to our university becoming worse at doing what it’s here to do.
Instead of encouraging creativity, the ultimate goal at McGill has become to establish oneself as some sort of public intellectual. If you’re not a public intellectual you’re an internet-personality / ridiculous piece of regrettable performance art. At least the former has employability potential, but both are the interpersonal equivalent of finding a gross coating on your tongue. Everyone wants to post the most liked comment on somebody else’s article, blog post, creative project, etc., and everyone likes pointing out all the ways that their own, mental, idealized, never to be written version of the piece of work in question would be better. People are so indoctrinated into expecting negativity that we’re only comfortable producing negativity – I mean, why publish something from your heart only to have people shit all over it when instead you could come up with a funny way of calling someone else’s work dumb and go to bed with three whole “likes”? Students who fall into the nightsweat-inducing category of “Canada’s intellectual youth” spend their time online declaring things “suck” or are “thinly veiled” attempts at *insert whatever* or are our generational buzzword: “irrelevant.” We call things irrelevant with ridiculous frequency and overconfidence. You’d think somebody died and made every jackass at McGill the arbiter of relevancy. The worst thing about these comment thread gun-shows we’ve become so fond of is that they’re just platforms for painfully vulnerable posturing themselves. McGill students are so hyperaware of the potential irony of anything they write that rather than engage constructively with the perceived problem, they try to glean self-worth through snide commentary about grammar and trivia. I mean, talk about “irrelevant.” People want notoriety as critics more than they want success as creators, and as a result we’ve got an atmosphere choked with cynics and non-conducive to earnestness. Like, did you cringe a little even reading that sentence? Think of a sassy response to it? The cycle is predictable, and entirely unproductive.
Write something you actually feel even if there isn’t an existing social script as to how the topic should be conveyed. Share things you like rather than things you want to mock. Get involved in groups and organizations and phase out anyone trying to detract from your enjoyment of those things. Smile at people and talk to people and don’t be judgey about the perfectly valid and contextually relevant things they do with their time. If something perfectly harmless grinds your gears, that’s sad for you, not everybody in the universe. Work on yourself as a person, rather than as a persona. Create things rather than critique things other people have created. I mean, do both but at least try to make sure you’re offering some positive output to temper your snarky rebukes. Anyone can be a little bitch.
Yeah, whatever, I know I sound like I’m going to tell everyone to bake a cake out of rainbows, but considering in a few short months I won’t even go here (anymore) I may as well throw in that our catty, self-involved dynamic is immature and weird and makes us look insecure as hell and I’m excited to enter a new stage of life, one where competitiveness is at least capitalistic, rather than just vitriolic. Also, it’s a little off-topic, but I’m sort of psyched to no longer live in a place where “pastagate” is a thing and Mont Royal qualifies as a real mountain. Sure, I’m totally griping, but I’m at McGill. It’s the look.