By Ryan Broderick, Editor-in-Chief
Like any Hofstra student, I came into yesterday’s University Town Hall meeting with my chest puffed out and ready to finally unleash all of my pent up anger and frustration with Hofstra and its miles of red tape. Right? Yesterday was finally a chance to air grievances and let those b—–ds know they don’t care about us. I mean you can’t put two Hofstra students in a room together without “Lackmann tastes like s–t” or “Our athletics teams always lose” or “F–k the Hofstra shuffle, I can’t believe I have to walk all over the God damned Earth just to sign in for a class.”
But instead of double-speak and roundabout answers, something really odd happened. Students asked questions and administrators gave incredibly reasonable answers.
In the course of an hour, all my steam was gone. There was no more Hofstra hate because for every question asked there were reasonable, well-based and matter-of-fact answers. So really, where does Hofstra’s bad press come from? When I leave campus and tell people I go to Hofstra I hear, “Oh wow, Hofstra? I’ve heard that’s a pretty good school.” I can say I’ve never received snub for it, that’s for sure. Yet, if you surveyed students here you’d feel like we were sitting naked in the dirt, eating bugs.
So as a student, I felt pretty embarrassed sitting there. Students have so many complaints and opinions and what do I find out? I find out that administrators are actually interested and thinking about helping us, and that maybe all the complaining and bellyaching is completely on us. And yes, maybe you can say I fell for administrative spin. But at Wednesday’s meeting (where students were completely outnumbered by administrators) the constant answer to complaints was that no one brings it to the University’s attention or attempts to get involved.
Which actually seems to make far more sense than the image you hear of, one where administrators sit atop a golden pillar counting their billions and not caring about us — although in real life, Rabinowitz uses a golden elevator. But that’s probably more of an interior design choice.
Maybe it’s the culture of Long Island. I’m from Massachusetts and one of the first things I noticed was that Long Island culture is a complaint-based social system. Person A complains to Person B about Problem C and slowly a friendship grows. Maybe Hofstra’s soured student body is just a side effect of that.
All that I know is that the only resource I’ve ever found lacking from Hofstra University was a student body that gave a shit. I’ve never wished I could talk to my professors more, never needed more internship opportunities, never wanted a more comfortable campus and never asked for food services that were more accessible (even though I think Lackmann is in fact bland garbage). My only complaint is that when I hear about something fun and interesting at a higher level school I usually just hear, “It’ll never work”. Why doesn’t it work? Because our student body f–king blows.
