If you paid any attention to the Otago Daily Times’ reporting last year, it would become immediately apparent the horrendous things we students are capable of doing are only becoming more recurrent.
Neglect the silent majority of students simply fighting the good fight and you will no doubt begin to see the student breed as a fearsome species capable of nothing but laziness and worse, drunken antics.
Yet, to me it seems there is something distinctly worse to worry about, this being an overwhelming apathy to the student experience which threatens to topple the historic tenets of student culture in their entirety.
Based on this slightly dark premonition, I have decided to compile a few predictions which may signal what the coming year in studentville will be like.
Perhaps things will get better? Yet, in all likelihood things will probably get worse.
Yep, not going to sugarcoat that one for you.
In casting these dire predictions, I hope that fate will be forced to prove me wrong, inciting a coalition of positive forces from both the city and the flats to change things.
A boy can only dream.
As initiations so blatantly highlighted, something is not quite right with our university’s traditional party culture.
Gone are the open street hosts and other absurdly funny events hosted by generations past.
In their place sits a more docile student body, strangely apathetic to the comings and goings of student life.
You can speculate on the reasons for this all you want, but it seems that the university is being increasingly utilised as a degree-producing factory for the individual rather than a place for shared learning and experience.
Hindering a now defunct cultural practice, the wild Castle St culture may soon be a thing of the past.
It makes the proctor and by extension the university happy, and it makes the desperately ambitious students happy — that’s got to be a win then, hasn’t it?
Well, not exactly.
The other consequence of an overarching student apathy is the further demise of student elections.
Last year, the OUSA president ran unopposed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if no-one even bothers to run this year.
Big whoop, I hear you saying, but remember that OUSA sends volunteers into the community, supports welfare projects and invests in local business.
While partying in general may subside, this doesn’t necessarily mean the ODT will have less to report on in the student community.
In their misguided search for acceptance, the plight of a few dedicated breathers (students) will result in some truly jaw-dropping antics.
While these antics can be noble — shout out to the person who managed to get a cone on top of a 20m tree in the gardens — it’s usually dangerous, a split-second impulse which results in a ruined life and a gut-wrenching reaction from the public.
It will likely be in O Week, orchestrated by a second-year on Castle St, hungry for power.
It could be a water balloon fight turned full-on brawl, or something more sinister.
Any grotesque thing you can think of is a sad possibility during the opening weeks of the new semester.
Damn, that got dark.
But don’t worry, I’m predicting there will be a turning point.
We already saw it last year in the form of individuals grouping together to stand up for collective causes.
This is the student body at its finest, a powder keg of connection and ambition for social change which blows up in the most spectacular of ways.
Think of the Heavybreathers, a group of 33 third-year blokes who raised almost $100,000 for charity.
Then there’s the group of students who went so much further than their mandate, jumping into the firing line at protests to advocate for the rights of future students and academics.
These isolated incidents may soon grow into a combined front, as students attempt to carve out a new community from the debris of the post-Covid era.
Additionally, the university will likely take a more proactive approach in monitoring students.
The proctor is undoubtedly going to earn his bread.
I would love to think that the university takes action in the right way, channelling student activity, albeit subtly, in a way which opens the culture to a series of new possibilities.
Very realistically, we could see the university take a harder line with troublemakers.
We may even see the medieval pillory located outside the proctor’s office make a return.
I pity the poor kid who spends a night in that prison.
When we tally all these predictions up, we get a student scene which scarcely resembles that of 10 years prior.
Not to be dramatic, but this year at Otago may be deemed a battle for the soul of the student.
It very well may be a defining epoch in student culture as we war with a crumbling bureaucratic megalodon and the horrific mistakes made by scared kids, internally fracturing the student body and slating the reputation of the student simultaneously.
Take all of this with a grain of salt.
My musings could simply be those of a deranged person, way too invested in the plight of the student pub.
Yet I hope this has provided ample entertainment, and something to think about next time the sirens wail in studentville.
- Hugh Askerud is a 20-year-old local resident and student at the University of Otago, majoring in politics and religious studies. His column exploring scarfie culture has been running on www.odt.co.nz and will now appear fortnightly in the Otago Daily Times.
