Words| Rachel Lavin
Someone once said that ‘student politics is so bitter precisely because the stakes are so low’. We go overboard because we have nothing to lose. It’s not like someone who gets their reputation ruined or who gets ousted from a position has a family to feed, or a lifelong career that will be lost, or that any of this has any real tangible effect outside of our insular little Trinity bubble. All that’s really at stake is ego. And so we’re a little more liberal with our criticism of each other, a little more melodramatic, a little less humane.
I had a conversation about this lately, with two recent graduates, both who would have held high positions in the world of student debating and publications. Both would have climbed the ranks and been conceived as the ‘big dick players’, that cringe-worthy nickname that denotes the height of Trinity society. They reflected on their time in college and their experience of society life in Trinity in the past four years. And both, in reflection, agreed that there was something very wrong at the core of it.
We all admitted that in first and second year, we believed that if Trinity contains ‘the best and brightest’ and with a wider variety of students imitating larger society’s structures, then surely Trinity society life is just a smaller microcosm of real life? Surely if we ‘could make it here, we could make it anywhere’. We climbed ranks, partly out of ego, but mostly because we wanted reassurance that success in whatever path we pursued was actually feasible. We were doing it to assure ourselves that we would be okay.
Yet we expected a lot of each other in return. We imposed the highest standards of the highest echelons of society we were trying to imitate. When people didn’t meet them we pulled them down mercilessly. With bloodlust disguised as moral outrage we publicly shamed those out of their depth, those who faltered, those who made mistakes.
And so when we encountered many bitter instances of cruel behaviour by society members, be that openly scheming, social climbing, hack work, false moral outrage, public shaming and lusty schadenfreude we took it as par for the course. This is what life is like in the real world, we told ourselves, this is what is coming. We were living a sort of pseudo-principled version of reality. Minus one thing of course; basic human kindness.
This was the surprising realisation that so affronted the recent graduates. Being a dickhead doesn’t really work in real life. You can be brilliant, intelligent and versed in Rousseau, but if you aren’t basically decent and compassionate, considerate and humane, nobody wants to work with you. And if you aren’t genuinely invested in what you pursue then what is the point? With larger hurdles and less of an audience for your achievements, authentic personal commitment to your work is all that becomes important. In fact people view kindness and authenticity as so important that any signs of cruelty or false behaviour are seen as so damaging as to cancel out all other attributes. And they’re right.
Sometimes in Trinity we can’t seem to see the basic humanity behind all our highly principled rhetoric and demands of each other. While these principles and standards are important in wider society, where people hold high levels of power, when livelihoods, sometimes even lives, are at stake, in an intimate student society, and in a community where we all know each other and can afford to understand each other more, see the context for misdemeanours and see exceptions to these stringent rules more clearly, we can alter our expectations to take these faults into account. We can afford to be a little kinder. Yet we rarely are.
With that in mind, and in the onslaught of student politics in recent weeks we thought we’d make our theme this month ‘reality check’. We looked outside our little bubble at serious problems facing the minorities in our society. Young Irish Muslims reflect on life here in the West as they deal with how their identity has become wrongfully associated with something more sinister. We spoke to Jack Kavanagh on facing disability and how trinity needs to improve its access. Our deputy Jane takes a trip around Dublin on a night bus that aims to aid homeless heroin addicts in a wonderfully simple but powerful way. And Gareth Gregan interviews the sister of a Dublin teenager unlawfully imprisoned in Egypt and potentially facing the death penalty, Ibrahim Halawa.
Not to end on a complete note of despair for the student politics in Trinity. The next generation of Trinity students seem a little more self-aware than they were before. Sexism is more readily called out, homophobia is intolerable, people are slightly more aware of their privilege. Maybe it’s changing and Lynn Ruane is a promising breath of fresh air. She’s grounded in the real world, older and wiser, and therefore less in danger of getting sucked into the nitty gritty nature of toxic student politics. She’s taking on feasible goals like access for disadvantaged students rather than ridiculous motions to ban coca cola in Trinity shops for the two weeks it sponsored the Olympics. And above all, she seems genuine and kind. We definitely need more of that inside this little bubble.
