In 1914, a student named Margaret Bennet made an observation. She couldn’t set it as her Facebook status, post it to Twitter, text it to a friend or generate a meme. Instead, she scrawled it in her scrapbook.
Ninety-seven years later, four students visited the University Archives, where the archivists handed over Bennet's scrapbook. In it, she wrote that there are two kinds of students at Northwestern: The Cuts who cut class and the Grinds, who grind their noses in the books. Bennet, an English major, admitted she was a Grind.
The group — Weinberg sophomores Edwin Lim and Alex Glancy, Communication sophomore Monica Yi and Weinberg junior Bhargav Rajamannar — were mutual friends, but Lim brought them together to brainstorm project proposals for an Inspire Media Symposium Open Media Grant. They began by talking about their time at Northwestern.
“Any freshman at Northwestern would tell you how amorphous this place is. No one knows what it’s like or what scene they belong in,” Lim says. “We wanted to do something to make our experiences a little bit more holistic.”
They have since created a Tumblr filled with scanned photos from the Archives, juxtaposed with present day photos of students in parallel settings. They have recreated or posed some new photos, but their goal is for Northwestern students to submit their own updated interpretations of their archive finds.
“It’s a community-building effort and a nerdy history project that we all found cool,” Yi says. Glancy adds that it also serves as an art project.
Inspire Media, a student-run organization that produces socially-conscious media, awards a handful of grants for socially-conscious, tangible exhibits in their annual symposium. Inspire selected the Cuts & Grinds group to receive one of their alumni-funded OMGs because of its historical vision.
“Their whole project is getting everyone aware of our past and our history,” says Meredith McGowan, Inspire’s Vice President of Productions. “Aware of our past and how it can shape the future, and how it shapes the present now.”
Comparing past and present
In conjunction with Margaret Bennet’s scrapbook, the group drew inspiration for their project from the 99 Columbians exhibit – a collection of student portraits and quotes created by two Columbia University students during the 2009-2010 academic year. The exhibit features 99 students with different backgrounds and styles, but combines all of their equally-sized photos to imply campus unity.
Northwestern students were less differentiated before the foundation of the six schools, before Sheridan was paved and campus extended north of Lunt Hall. The group said they recognize the realities of a bifurcated campus, dozens of extracurriculars and vast academic options and how, despite “One Northwestern” campaigns, strategic plans and diversity conversations, such developments make the experience of each Northwestern student increasingly individualized.
Lim wanted to create a then-and-now collection of photos to explain that – despite the ways in which student life at Northwestern has changed – the features that have stayed the same are the ones that define Northwestern culture. It is a culture the project says would not exist without archives.
“By nature, you as a person are always going to be a part of several different communities, family, sports teams,” Lim says. “That community only exists because it has a history and, by being a part of that community, you’re inheriting something unique and intrinsic about it.”
The university hires professional photographers to capture the supposed essence of campus life, but Cuts & Grinds looks for photos taken through a student lens – photos that are candid and those that reveal a range of emotions and activities, instead of just documenting Northwestern as an institution.
“If it weren’t for students, this place wouldn’t exist,” Glancy says.
The Cuts & Grinds exhibit will include an interactive component with a Polaroid camera to continue the immortalizing archival process in real time. They plan to send the photos to the students in a few years. In the meantime, they hope students will continue to send submissions to the Cuts & Grinds project long after Symposium ends.
“A photo goes a long way in the aggregate,” Lim says. “Submitting a picture isn’t going to have consequence by itself, but putting it under one umbrella, you’ll define this culture entirely.”
Archiving never stops
Glancy says that she considers the Cuts & Grinds project a “revival of archives.” After 1994 and the introduction of the digital camera, the Northwestern University Archives saw less hard copy submissions. Today, people retain their own files and documents on flash drives, hard drives or Facebook profiles. She says that this inhibits them from being able to filter the most important parts of their identities.
“The idea of archiving is never supposed to stop,” Glancy says. “By submitting your photos, you’re proclaiming who you are coming out of your dorm or your Facebook profile community into the same melting pot, whether it’s a Tumblr or it’s a display.”
The University Archives staff has worked closely with the Cuts & Grinds crew, combing through just a fraction of the Archives’ collections. University Archivist Kevin Leonard says he is enthusiastic about the project and has been than willing to share items and information with the group, but he also hopes the group will submit what they collect for the project, because student submissions are rare in the digital age.
“They’re helping me with my sales pitch,” Leonard says. “We’re always interested in members of the Northwestern community who are recording information because that’s where history lives, in documents. If it’s not recorded, it’s ephemeral. If it’s ephemeral, it’s gone.”
Leonard fondly recalls a past in which most archives were tangible and perceptible using the five senses rather than with intermediary machines. But it’s not just a sense of nostalgia that makes him miss those days – it’s an exponentially increasing fear that he and other archivists won’t be able to keep up. A lot of achievable material has been lost in the digital age simply because archivists have not had the know-how or technology to process it. On top of that, he worries about the security of corporate information ownership.
“Facebook might be purchased by Kraft cheese someday,” Leonard says. “If you want to have a better appreciation of what you’re doing now and maybe a sense of the trajectory, that’s our job: To retain the materials that help to tell the story.”