An honest campus playlist

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You know I, I’m afraid of change
Guess that’s why we stay the same

When I graduate this summer, I will have been on campus for almost nine years. I’m not a perpetual undergrad like certain student union executives who have since departed – my first degree took five years and my second degree will take four – but I feel as if this campus needs an anthem and I’ve found one in Noah Cyrus’ “July”.

I’ve written plenty about this campus’ glacial approach to change, but this week I’m fucking tired, folks. My inbox is filled to the brim with academics who seem to think quarantine means productivity starter kit, that this pandemic is far less a mass disruption of everyone’s lives and more a reason to send out invitations to committee meetings and ask for progress reports. This campus needs an infusion of empathy and it needs it fast.

 

So tell me to leave, I’ll pack my bags, get on the road
Find someone that loves you better than I do, darling, I know

The capitalist machine of the university does not love you. International students, who make up less than twenty per cent of our student population, pay fifty per cent of tuition, it seems. Every flight in is just an influx of dollar signs in some hapless administrator’s eyes – I’ll leave who you think that administrator is to your own imagination.

This isn’t to say certain academics don’t love you. Your supervisors in graduate school, if you found the right ones, care for you. There are many who know just how fucked the system is. I do think it’s telling how many campus figures are getting down on their hands and knees to lick Vianne’s boots on her way out, given that eight years ago they were a vote away from removing both her and the provost. As Cyrus says, “Guess that’s why we stay the same.”

The U of R has chronically underfunded everything that matters to a student, save perhaps counselling services. Food is about three seconds away from being slop troughs served by robots – if anyone’s wondering Chartwell’s song lyric is from Black Bear’s “Hot Girl Bummer”

Fuck you and you, and you

I hate your friends and they hate me too

I guess this means that some areas need their own songs as well, it’s only fair. The campus’ administrative team, with its obsession with changing names but nothing else, has to be Grace Vanderwaal’s “I Don’t Know My Name”

I don’t know my name
I don’t play by the rules of the game

I’m going to be kind to housing services because I used to live and work there. I’ll leave the indignation to Taylor MacPherson – though it was well deserved.

I’m coming home
I’m coming home
Tell the world I’m coming home
Let the rain wash away all the pain of yesterday
I know my kingdom awaits and they’ve forgiven my mistakes

The Cougars & Rams deserve a popular song, so here’s Post Malone’s “I Fall Apart”, it seems fitting given how few championships we have to our name.

Oooh, I fall apart
Down to my core
Ooh, didn’t know it before
Surprised when you caught me off guard

Some of the departments who think that surpluses are made to be shifted to other other areas for some political point scoring, cough, Arts, cough, need a little bit of George Strait in their lives.

Just give it away
There ain’t nothing in this house worth fightin’ over
Oh, we’re both tired of fightin’ anyway
Just give it away

 

Student Affairs and Recruitment get a song from the musical Avenue Q

 

I need an academic advisor to point the way!
We could be…

Sitting in the computer lab,
4 a.m. before the final paper is due,
cursing the world ’cause I didn’t start sooner,
and seeing the rest of the class there, too!

As it happens, so does IT Services

The internet is for porn.
The internet is for porn.
Grab your dick and double click
For porn! Porn! Porn!

Call it a low blow, but Campion and Luther both get Kanye’s “Jesus Walks”

God show me the way because the Devil’s tryin’ to break me down
(Jesus Walks with me)
The only thing that I pray is that my feet don’t fail me now (I want Jesus)
(Jesus Walks)
And I don’t think there is nothing I can do now to right my wrongs
(Jesus Walks with me)
I want to talk to God, but I’m afraid because we ain’t spoke in so long
(I want Jesus)

Right, back to July.

‘Cause you remind me every day, I’m not enough, but I still stay

             Sure, academia’s fucked, but we’ve already sunk thousands of dollars into this bid to feel educated. And, there’s a secret to all of this: you’re already in the real world. Folks like to claim that the real world doesn’t start until you graduate. Newsflash, there’s nothing like being broke to make you learn to manage money. There’s no better time to meet people from new cultures than at university, but it’s not our fault that our elders have forgotten that empathy and openness to new experience. The world makes people bitter and twisted, often a double dose if they happen to come from a marginalized community, but I’d rather turn to music when I want to burn the whole thing down and start over.

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