Safe New World

Rejected Column File:

David Byrne says that heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. It’s a self-designed paradise—a nice place to sit for an eternity, to never suffer or participate ever again. It’s in our social nature to fabricate our ecosystem with this ideal in mind. Chapman is a place where we forget that nothing ever happens, and overlook the things outside this bubble that do happen. It's nowhere near being heaven, as Jim Doti is nowhere near being god.

Collectively, we create Chapman’s atmosphere to harbor the complacency and comfort of the student body. So I have to wonder how leaders are able to make complaints about apathy when the school actively nurtures this opiated state. Not much time passes between people commenting on our indifferent, ignorant and self-absorbed student body. As proof, they usually cite things like poor event attendance, a 16 percent turnout in elections or a general lack of knowledge about how we’re affected by world events. However, this kind of non-participation doesn’t define apathy—only the effects of its process. It’s this silent and communal message that reinforces the idea that we don’t care about how our university behaves. This then reasserts the University's rights to exercise power over us.

Though, the deeper meaning of the message may be that there’s no real communication to stimulate action in the first place. We can’t easily establish a strong voice of dissent, because all free speech on this campus has to go through official channels in order to be considered legitimate. Speech as truth is filtered, sanitized, given a message, before it gains its public face. Because we lack this objective critique of our environment, we don’t think critically about it. We become distracted by all the inflated self-promotion: the odd Pep Rally where we dedicated the parking structure’s pit; the naming ceremony of Glass Hall; or the upcoming Spring Sizzle.

The events are generic, because the school does its best to preserve its image as a classical academy. We’re packaged as a safe institution that doesn’t challenge the standard discourse about the university’s place in society, because institutions like that don’t make money in Orange County. It’s one of the reasons Chapman almost went bankrupt in the early eighties. Think of why we haven’t put any money into a stronger science or anthropology program. They’re subjects that pose questions best answered by god.

Our administration is aware that an organization can only run smoothly if there is no conflict with normal procedure. We’re a conservative school in terms of our behavior and actions. We can easily advocate funneling money into the humanities, protest as tuition rises, because the school is ultimately irrelevant without its students. We won’t. It’s not a “safe” decision. Our peace of mind is bought off with scholarships and we proceed as isolated bodies within our respective disciplines.

We normalize any external factors that may appear foreign and strange to us. Permanent room temperature sets in. There are no people protesting on the corners of our campus. The Panther always tells us the truth. Freedom of speech is supposed to be limited on private grounds. Public relations rhetoric doesn’t infiltrate our community dialogue. We imagine our heaven as the proverbial existential vacuum, where words and actions are empty of meaning because of the Truth that meaning might carry. And our responsibility lies in imagining what else heaven could be.