By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 13, 2013
Well, UFV, you’ve done it again. You’ve proved that we are, indeed, the hippest university ever.
We are the rebellious and often-ignored sibling. We are that plaid-wearing, vinyl-listening, thrift-store shopping university with big glasses and a don’t-care attitude.
When universities were cool, we were a college. Later, when universities were less cool, we became the ironic university-college. Even later, when everyone thought they knew what a university was, we gained university status and threw the definition in the face of The Man. We’re small. We’re personal. We’re a commuter campus. No one’s ever seen a university like us before. Damn, UFV — you’re so figuratively underground you may as well be literally underground.
We don’t need praise. We don’t need approval. We don’t let The Man tell us what to do. And we definitely don’t let a national newspaper give us grades. Grades are for fools. External recognition? For fools. Bragging rights? For fools. A place on a national standard of post-secondary excellence? For fools, and fools only!
This is precisely why we refused to send our statistics into The Globe and Mail for their highly-acclaimed, cross-country annual university report. We don’t want to be on that report. We are too cool for that report.
I mean, we’ve been on that report before. It’s not really all that important. I mean, we got “A”s all over the place. Thanks, Globe and Mail, but we don’t need your grades. It’s just going to detract from our street cred, you know? If it looks like we still need mommy and daddy to tell us how cool we are, our mad rep is going to go down the drain faster than you could say “honour roll.” We can’t sell out like that.
We don’t need motivation to be awesome. We just are. So that’s why we didn’t submit any data to this national report. We just chose not to, in order to preserve our hipster cool. Our absence is completely on purpose, and don’t you doubt it for a second.
So if you happen to be browsing through the annual Globe and Mail university report card, you go ahead and feel a swelling pride in your gut. We’re too damn cool to be included.
