President Henry Bienen doesn’t have the power to declare war, and he’s probably not cutting tuition anytime soon, so when he takes the stage for his annual state of the university speech Thursday, we won’t hear anything new. Judging from the trajectory of his past speeches — from “very, very good” to “excellent” — the only surprise this year will be the adjective he’ll use to describe just how well Northwestern is doing.
The state of Northwestern, at least for President Bienen and administrators, will mostly come down to numbers such as how much the endowment has grown, the bump in applications to record levels the school saw this year, and how many meal plan points were spent at Norbucks. But to current undergraduates — those who’ve had to plan new routes around construction and frozen sidewalks so slippery that “they’re a lawsuit waiting to happen,” in the words of Weinberg freshman Jesse Wiener — that bright light is only the sun’s glare off the ice and not a shining beacon of academic excellence.
Even what will indubitably be the highlight of Bienen’s speech — that application numbers have skyrocketed — some students humorously dismiss that as just something that “makes us seem more intelligent than we are,” said Weinberg freshman Andrew August. When asked their thoughts on Northwestern being considered as the place for Ivy rejects, the table of freshmen including August, Wiener and Steven Pals, began talking excitedly over each other, dismissing the idea as ludicrous.
“We’re not Princeton, Yale or Harvard,” August said. “But we’re never going to be.”
Then there are the perennial complaints. Classes are too large. Dorms look exactly like they did 30 years ago, sometimes literally: Pals now lives across the hall from the room his father occupied three decades ago in Elder, and, according to the elder Mr. Pals, the place hasn’t changed a bit.
Said Jessica Ratner, a freshman living in Bobb: “The hallways smell really bad… they could keep them cleaner on the weekends.”
And, of course, dissatisfaction with Norris is so oft-repeated that even this brief mention is barely worth the pixels it takes up on the screen.
But students seem to understand that some of the problems are inevitable and the administration has take positive steps to fix them. Large economics classes aren’t an issue for Mateen Manshadi, a Weinberg sophomore. “The professors are very approachable,” Manshadi said. “They always have office hours and the TAs are helpful too.”
Not all may agree, however. “I hear professors complain that they don’t get the classrooms they want, that they’re forced to cram kids into rooms that are too small,” said Sana Rahim, a Weinberg freshman.
For the most part, students seem pleased with Northwestern’s offerings, such as the Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences program, when they hear about them. “Northwestern, I think, does a bad job of informing students about the programs offered before they come here,” Wiener said. “I didn’t know about MMSS before I got here, I just found out. I’m happy that I can apply for it next year [by taking MENU instead this year].”
The MMSS program should be applied for once a student is accepted but before they enroll; however, if a student takes the Mathematical Experience for Northwestern Undergraduates (MENU) sequence, they can apply for MMSS at the end of freshman year.
Earning one of the more unusual gripes from students was ASG’s convoluted procedure for gaining recognition for a new student group. Wiener, August and Pals are working on establishing a club about “secret content.” After ten minutes of building unfounded intrigue, they finally and sheepishly admitted the club will be about microfinance.
But a PhD in economics might be necessary to figure out ASG’s rules. Not being able to reserve a room for a group meeting until the group has ASG recognition, but not being able to get recognition until the group can prove that it exists and meets, is a logical riddle that even Wiener, a MENU student, said he can’t figure out. “It gets complicated,” agreed Pals.
But for all the criticisms that Northwestern lads and ladies find fit to keep bringing up, some students offer good words about the university.
“Well it’s just a fact of life, I guess,” Manshadi says about the construction, “We couldn’t have asked them to start five years earlier, someone else would have been upset.”
Through the dust and the ice and the “really ugly fliers on the ground,” which offend Sarah Hong, a freshman, there are apparently still things left to praise. “They [the administration] have put forth the initiative, and that’s all we can ask,” Manshadi said.
“The classrooms are clean and modern; they have what you need to learn, I guess, adequately,” August said with a chuckle. And what is Northwestern about, if not the learning? Actually, don’t answer that.