On Uni

(** Disclaimer **: When I say “Uni” or “Uni students” or anything else like that, I’m making generalizations. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but everything I say here is based on my own experiences and those of my close friends. If you feel anything here is inaccurate or misrepresented in any way, please feel free to comment or talk to me in person.)

Uni has been my home for the past 5 years, and I don’t mean that in a cliche way. Some days I actually spend more hours at Uni or Uni-related events than I do at my own house. Uni has become central to how I operate in my daily life, and to be honest I don’t know how I’m going to react to the change when I go off to college next year. But when I ask my friends, classmates, and Uni alums how they feel about Uni, I get quite a bit of mixed opinions. Most striking is that the people who are often openly critical about certain aspects of Uni are the ones that love it the most. Uni has done some pretty controversial things in the past, and if I had to generalize I would say probably a quarter of our (senior) class loves Uni, half are indifferent, and the last quarter absolutely hate it.

I don’t doubt that people who hate Uni have good reasons. Uni has done some pretty terrible stuff to some of my closest friends, and attempting to invalidate that seems like a horrible thing to do. In my opinion, Uni’s saving graces are the teachers and the academics. The teachers are seemingly unparalleled from the horror stories I’ve heard from friends who go to other schools, and on the whole Uni teachers are some of the most passionate, most intelligent, and most caring individuals I have ever had the good fortune of meeting. Uni’s academics are also another strong point. This sort of goes along with good teachers, because they are allowed to teach information that isn’t common core and therefore is actually interesting, but also I think the “lab school” is just a good idea in general when it comes to teaching new and untested material. I truly think that I've prospered more at Uni than I would've at any other high school, and I'm endlessly grateful for that.

There’s also just a lot of things wrong with Uni in general. Aside from the obvious problems with organization and the lackluster facilities, one thing Uni really needs to work on is students’ mentalities. I’ve met so many of the greatest people in my life through Uni, but I’ve also met some who I truly wonder if they display psychopathic tendencies. The pervasive idea at Uni that people need to look out for only themselves and cut down other people at any opportunity is not necessarily evident on the surface, but when you look closely, it’s there. It’s there when you hear people joke about putting the wrong answers in a class groupchat, it’s there when people give purposefully bad advice about college apps, it’s even there when friends don’t know how to interact besides roasting each other. This mindset is not only seriously damaging, but also kind of scary.

People at Uni have other flaws as well though. They’re too pretentious for their own good, don’t know how to interact with people who have different opinions than them, and they certainly haven’t learned good life skills for what the world outside of an academic environment is like. And for some people, this will never be a problem. Because here is where Uni’s flaws intersect with the very basis of the school’s mission. By siphoning off the top students from surrounding schools, we’ve inherently created an elite group that thinks they’re special, and that group will go on to be future leaders and creators. We want to point a finger and blame the people running our country right now, but unless people start taking hard looks at themselves, I don’t see our futures being much brighter.

But Uni has a lot of other problems. Uni tries to come off as “woke” and on the cutting-edge of liberal, but to me and a lot of other students it seems to be a front. Everything from the lack of diversity, to disrespect of female students by administration and peers, to microaggressions targeting students of color and LGBT+ students screams “we want to seem like we’re progressive but secretly we really don’t care”. Known abusers have been let off the hook with a slap on the wrist. I’ve had friends come to me in tears because no one will listen to their problems. Is this a problem that the administration has let get out of hand, or is the problem the administration itself? Deficit and several almost comical blunders aside, I don’t know if I can say. I hope that this is just a temporary problem that Uni will continue to work on in the coming years, but to be honest, I’m losing hope. It seems like every time some issue gets brought up, we all get angry about it, and then the amnesia sets in. No one really wants to talk about this, or work on it. I don’t know why I waited so long to say this, I’m a senior now so I don’t have much time to do anything. But I want to fix it.