Editorial
Do we have traditions?
By Editorial Staff
December 10, 2015
The Citrus Bowl should make us ask ourselves the same question every year: What are our traditions? The Citrus Bowl? Class and Charter Day? FebFest? These are the kinds of things that tour guides talk about.
But let’s consider the Citrus Bowl. It is nothing more than our first home hockey game, yet it has been elevated into Hamilton lore because of the traditional throwing of oranges onto the ice. The practice has been rightly banned. And yet we keep the name as if it remains a tradition. It’s a gimmick.
Consider the streaking team, perhaps Hamilton’s most vibrant recent tradition. Deemed illegal and harmful to the reputation of the College, the administration has made streaking an increasingly more punishable offence and done their best to crack down wherever possible. It’s hypocritical to include references and pictures of the streaking team in promotional materials—which the College did in a 2011’s “200 Days” feature in the Alumni Review—then send threatening emails “reminding” students that streaking is a violation of the code of conduct on the eve of Family Weekend. Traditions are not simply things which sound fun and quirky on tours. They are the things that make a college experience meaningful to its students that are there.
The culture of the College remains in transition since the upending of fraternity culture with the banning of houses in the ’90s. What the College administration needs to realize is that, more than successful sports teams and late night events, the things which break up the monotony of binge drinking and make our time here meaningful are those collective cultures, those momentary rebellions against the normal order which make traditions at a college. The Spectator does not advocate any activities which harm others, but we believe that there is a value in bending the rules for the feeling of togetherness. We believe that the College’s obsession with its own public image is harmful to the experience of students here.
We ask that the administration support a renaissance in what this school means to its students: the birth of a new culture, new spontaneous traditions. Despite its best efforts, the College cannot make these; it can only allow them.