Mail Bag: Social Media and College Right Now

I don’t think ten years from now, when I have two of my pet sperm wailing from down the hallway after I’ve just closed my eyes, I’m going to sit back and think, damn man, I’m glad I’m here and not college because..you know…Snapchat ruined it for me. I’m not going to do that because my life will suck, and so will yours. If I keep drinking the way I have been for the past three years, I’m not going to be able to even smell red meat, much less eat it, and blacking out on a weekday will happen through passing kidney stones, not 4Lokos. Unless you are both well paid and single in your thirties, you lose all your freedoms and the body that once helped you get a girl naked in a two-star Fort Lauderdale hotel’s hot tub. 

But college isn’t perfect, and it DEFINITELY is less fun compared to when this site was in its prime. Anybody that went to college during Trump’s presidency deserves at least a little money back. Not because of the COVID pandemic or the political tension on campuses, mostly because I feel like one-third of the conversations I’ve had in a college classroom have revolved around a seventy-four-year-old man who won’t be alive to see me make an impact in my field of study. That only partially explains why college is worse than when people still bought music for $0.99 on iTunes. The focal reason why the current college experience is so bad boils down to the presence of social media setting us up for expectations of perfect behavior that we will never be able to achieve. 

When the fuck have you turned on the news and seen two college kids in letters selling tee-shirts to raise money for cancer? Fucking never. The only time any chapter or college organization dominated by men makes the news is for a grainy Snapchat gone viral of a drunk moron doing something despicable. NO SHIT! Sigma Chi alone has 350,000 members; you think some genuinely bad people aren’t going to slip through the cracks, especially when the pledge process is shortened year after year? It’s a game of numbers. In an ideal world, none of that would happen. Still, in the world we live in, football teams, hockey houses, fraternities, fuck-even the Strawberry Grower’s Association of North America is going to have some problematic people. 

Greek life has a judiciary system with IFC and Nationals, just like a Baseball team has disciplinary actions handed down by a coach. If the overly woke movement were to take away Greek life, there would be no overarching power holding millions of drunk/high 18-22-year-olds accountable for their actions. You take away greek life, and those same kids that would have joined a fraternity together can just pool their money and create something else, without anybody telling them what to do. Don’t believe me? I give you the Virginia Tech scooter club:

And that, my friends, should be the reason why IFC and Nationals should never suspend a fraternity for making a few eighteen-year-old douchebags pick them up McDicks at 1:30 in the morning. You want to kick a chapter off because college kids wanted to throw a party during a pandemic? Cool. Now those kids have the option to find a house for next year for their Underwater Basket Weaving Club, where initiates are expected to get the piss beaten out of them. Guys were caught ranking women in a GroupMe? Damn, I bet if there were a Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunch Association, there would be absolutely fucking nothing stopping them from throwing a party the next day. 

Logically speaking, adults need to be more reasonable with the punishments they are handing out. Throwing a racist theme party and having three too many people in an off-campus house are two ENTIRELY different things. If college ever is to be as enjoyable of an experience as it once was, there needs to be a line in the sand that makes sense. Making a bunch of kids who haven’t faced much adversity outside of vicariously living through Eminem’s life in 8 Mile do things that are going to break their comfort zone isn’t really a bad thing, in my opinion. Sabotaging somebody’s life and forcing them to chug ungodly amounts of alcohol is. The former is a reality, and the latter is what the media wants your Mom to think.