Guest Column:

Name change won't help MU much

By Kristin Torres

Published Sept. 7, 2007

When I say I am from Fresno, Calif., what comes to mind? Swelling tides and rippling waves? A rousing game of beach volleyball?

Well, I hope neither, because there is no beach anywhere near Fresno and our chief exports are raisins and Kevin Federline. But being that this is MU, I have a hunch that that was not the first thing to come to mind at all.

Instead, if you are like many students I have met in my three weeks here, that honor belongs to, "Out of state? Why, she must be a journalism major."

I am a journalism major, but that's not the point.

With all the talk of deleting the "-Columbia" from MU's official name, I began to wonder why anyone is bothering to raise national recognition of the school when many of our own students seem unaware of any reason to take pride in it. If every out-of-state student is assumed to be a journalism major, what does that say about the plethora of other opportunities MU offers? There is a rhetoric each time we assume, which is that nothing here besides the obvious is worth the gas money or the plane ticket.

U.S. News and World Report, which recently evaluated 1,900 four-year colleges and universities, ranked MU at number 91. Let that sink in for a minute. Out of almost 2,000 schools, our school managed to crack the top 100.

There is no excuse for the woebegone attitude held by many of its students, whatever their major, whatever their hometown. And the attitude is contagious. Upon meeting a student from Louisiana, I immediately assumed he was here for journalism, but instead I found out he is a proud engineering major. His optimism gave me hope for the school until someone was quick to comment that he was not getting anything here that he could not get at home.

That is when I realized all of this bashing and disrespect for anything besides journalism has become a contagious, dangerous plague on campus. It is a sad plague that no steering committee can change until students themselves take matters into their own hands and start recognizing that this is not such a bad place to be after all.