By The Editorial Board
If you’re out with friends for a nice night on the town and you see a dude with a mini mic walk up to you, run.
Brand ambassadors like those for the rideshare app Fetii can be seen on and off campus at popular spots, interviewing students and posting the videos to social media. Typically, students will give their opinions on different Greek life organizations, discussing their well-informed and extensively thought-out theories on how Zetas are “toxic” and why members of Alpha Tau Omega are the most likely of all Baylor fraternities to “ghost” you.
It’s the exact type of intellectual content that our campus has been waiting for, and the mini mic warriors are doing the kind of boots-on-the-ground journalism that The Lariat could only dream of doing.
Jokes aside, Baylor students need to do some damage control when it comes to our image. As an institution of higher learning, you would think that our student body would know better than to let themselves be posted talking smack about others, especially if they’re on a night out with friends and potentially intoxicated.
But these are 19 to 22-year-olds we’re talking about here, so judgement isn’t exactly our forte, what with the underdeveloped frontal lobes we’re all rocking. Being negative is fun, and stirring up drama is our age group’s national pastime. In fact, being a hater is given a platform in at least one other way on our campus.
As All-University Sing wrapped up last weekend, YikYak, the anonymous message board app, was ablaze with insults and jokes of all kinds. Some were more light-hearted than others, but it’s hard to deny that sometimes the hating gets a little out of control. We reward the funniest posts with hundreds, if not thousands, of upvotes, and we name-drop performers or organizations. Because we get to hide behind anonymity, it’s easy to say the thing that’s on our mind that we might not say if those words could follow us around.
Funny how that changes when there’s a mic and an iPhone in your face recording you saying that thing.
We’re not trying to be buzzkills, but there has to be another way for our campus to bond that doesn’t include snide remarks made about others or airing out dirty laundry through a YikYak or a street interview. And we should be asking ourselves why it is that the times when our campus feels like it’s coming together the most — like Sing and Pigskin season — are often the times when we try to tear each other down more than usual.
We get it; it’s fun to watch the Fetii videos or scroll through YikYaks while you’re waiting for class to start. But we should all be making a better effort to embrace what it means to be a Baylor student through things like tradition, healthy competition and our commonalities rather than by being a hater.
