Birmingham Southern College - Southern Accent Yearbook (Birmingham, AL)

Page 12 text:

December, January, and February as they are in Birming- ham are months which s houldn ' t happen to any yeatjany place. It ' s cold-a damp, garment penetrating cold that defies the fee- ble old paint-caked radiators, the kind you can lean against and get a streak of warmth up the back of each thigh and buttock while the rest of your body remains as chill as the rest of the room. Just the cold wouldn ' t really be so bad, but for the ram coming slow and steady for weeks on end until the quadrangle becomes spongy underfoot and crisscrossed with little dams of dead grass. Everyday in class you sit and feel the moisture slip through your shoes, quietly assured that some- one has walked off with the umbrella you left dripping in the hall. The final thing about winter here, thoughts the utter and total grayness that makes the buildings uglier even than they are and the people seem ashen and wilted. Too, over all is the industrial stench of Birmingham, which carries on the wet air and strikes you on the day ' s first door opening. For many, that smell of Birmingham on a cold, gray, 7 o ' clock morning before the sun burns the vapors away must be the enduring mental abbreviation for that pernicious depression that stalks us all in the winter.

Page 11 text:

There is a way to survive, though. When the big questions — those of future, ambition, and sanity — become too great, you can always submit to the mesmerism of campus life. There is no novocain so complete, no numbness so sublime as the complex, non-crucial routine of subsisting on this campus. Among labs and library carrels, with erudite, unthinking re- search in beige-walled dorm rooms you can actually accom- plish the difficult task of losing yourself — from yourself. Surely, there must be some here who are either so well ad- justed or so unconscious to begin with that such a spiritual vacation at some time during four years is not necessary. But most of us, soon or late, become so suffocated that nerveless absorption with the task of learning is a welcome respite. It is like living by an outline, form without content, in which the spin! is an ob|ective and unconcerned spectator to the postur- ings of its body. It is very easy to fall into the habit of labeling that which we are too lazy to analyze or unable to define as intangible, and you have probably heard it said that Southern has such a quality, some pervading essence which draws and holds peo- ple to it. Southern does have an intangible, or at least an elusive, quality which sets it apart; but this feeling produces estrangement and affection, loyalty and distaste in relatively equal amounts. It is this quality which produces our need for occasional self isolation and which spawns the perennial talk of transfer to a more attractive, sophisticated campus. Paradoxically, the same aspect of life at Southern brings us back each year in spite of our protestations and creates in us a grudging, but tenacious, affection. If we cannot pinpoint what it is about this school that be- longs uniquely to it, at least it is not difficult to say when it operates most strongly; when this hill becomes a complete world for you, detached from outside ties of location and af- fection; when you feel like a tiny, sterilized bearing in a great, slow grinding gear, and there is a persistent heat behind your eyes that means you are torn between an absolute hate and repulsion for every person here and a staggering need to have |ust one person care if you now or ever walk down that cold hill in the early morning. The time when it really gets you is winter quarter.

Page 13 text:

It is this internal burden, engendered and nurtured in soli- tude, which inevitably sends a few home before the work is done. But each of us, too, labors under an external burden that is very much a part of this college and constitutes its big- gest problem: Administrationism. Administrationism means that total fascination with antiseptic account books and impersonal grade point averages which characterizes second floor Munger. It ' s what gives you the feeling that they would gladly sacrifice your present or future happiness, career — even burn your body — just to keep the books in balance. Administrationism is what causes your throat to constrict and your hands to get sweaty when you stand there trying to schedule a class or find out how many hours and quality points you need. You know that its not a question of if anything is wrong; just how wrong. It is really amazing that such a tremendous body of regula- tions and procedures can accrue around the task of directing one thousand lives. After awhile, you actually begin to think of yourself as a being composed of polarities of obedience and non-obedience caught amid the subtle manifestations of the gap between the leaders and the masses: the sidewalks that don ' t go where anyone wants to walk, but serve only to awkwardly circumnavigate chain-guarded areas where grass seed have been spread on the rocks; the convocations called simply because every week has a Wednesday; the fact that the college employs someone who zealously tickets unstickered cars on a campus where parking has never been a problem. There is a deeper schism, too. One occasioned not by lack of communication but by absence of common purpose. One that fosters evasiveness, furtiveness, and a get by attitude among us, and is evidenced by the fact that so many officials work so tirelessly at holding us to a system of behavior which has little relevance to our education and which many have found personally unfeasible. And so the college contributes its part to our seasonal with- drawal and introspection. And Southern can really expect little loyalty toward the institution itself as long as it adheres to a policy of rules made to fit the occasion and after the fact. Little loyalty will come as long as navigating among the ex- isting rules, policies, and practices continues to remind us of daily going to the same stone wall, backing off ten equal paces and daily running headlong into that wall.