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But what does it even mean to be a student? More importantly, what does it mean to be a good student, a successful student?

If you think it means getting good grades and building a resume, then you may have wasted your money here. Sure, you’ll make it all back (eventually), and your education will have (presumably) paid for itself, but that’s not what going to college should be about.

If it’s about studying diligently, doing three hours of homework, and honestly creating your very best work possible, then I certainly couldn’t say with a straight face that I have been a good student by any stretch of the imagination.

I really don’t have any answers to the questions regarding being a good student, but I have an idea of where they might be found.

Students are the lifeblood of the university. I think this is pretty obvious to everyone č our tuition dollars pay for about 80 percent of everything that goes on here, and if students weren’t here, there would be no reason for our university’s existence.

Yet while our university has been serving students for 150 years, we have had surprisingly little direct influence on the decisions, policies, and direction of the university.

From the perspective of faculty and staff, many of whom have built their careers in decades of service to the university, individual students have been flowing in, through, and out of this place constantly. While each individual student may have made her or his mark on a professor or in a class or in an extracurricular or on the field, those accomplishments last only as long as they are remembered.

Looking back on archived issues of this paper, one can see the student body arguing the same old lines and fighting the same old battles that we’ve been fighting in all our years here. The fight over funding for student organizations. The fight over the loss of student space to office space. The fight over the most
recent racist graffiti. The fight over an outdated student center.

But none of these are truly fights. They’re just momentary tantrums of juvenile rebellion, and their legacy is a fate worse than being forgotten č they are remembered forever not because of what they meant or what they were for, but only as another example of how students get uppity every once in a while.

Certainly, a student movement here and an antiwar protest there makes a difference for a short while.
Everyone gets energized for a time č there’s a feeling of accomplishment in the air, and people are satisfied with themselves č but if there is little or no real institutional change, then everything we do here amounts to little more than an exercise in pointlessness.

If we, as students, are going to be true learners and creators and contributors in this place, then we must continue our causes and perpetually pass them on to younger students. We must remember where we’ve been, where we want to go, how we can get there, and how to keep the fight going.

To do this, we must create our own institution that will outlast all of us and fight for issues important and central to students.

My fellow seniors Colin Schumacher and Colin Smith and I have discussed creating a new informal student association that will seek progressive solutions to Hamline’s many problems and promote and strengthen those features of our university that made all of us choose to make it our home.

This student group would continually lobby the university administration to make decisions and policies that actually live up to our quite lofty ideals of diversity, student-centeredness, and social justice.
This is an ambitious undertaking, and we’ve got to get it going quickly, because we seniors don’t have much time left here.

We’re looking for your help, so if you’re up for trying to make Hamline all that it can be, let us know and we’ll see what we can get accomplished together. If we can manage to set up a self-perpetuating force for positive progressive change on campus, then we will not only have accomplished something real and tangible, but we will ensure that future students will have an easier go of it than we did.

And I think that somewhere on the road from here to there, we will find what it means to be a student and a truly good one at that.