A funny thing happened last week. President Ruben Armiñana became a human being.
Up until this point, he was an idea.
But then he walked into the bookstore and perused the birthday card section. Though I asked if he needed help finding a humorous card, he politely declined and left the store. What was once the faceless leader of an administration accused of losing touch with the student body was now a surprisingly unimposing, Santa Claus-esque man. And this forced me to re-evaluate my stance on Armiñana as an administrator.
There is something lost when we view those against us as less than human. When someone is an idea, they are much easier to deconstruct. Suddenly, I found that I would have difficulty taking the easy pot shots at Armiñana because now he is someone who, more or less, deals with the same issues that I do. Becoming human means that now the little stuff is brought into the picture.
What kind of pizza toppings does President Armiñana enjoy? What's his favorite sports team? What's his favorite movie? Does Armiñana sing in the shower? Has Armiñana played the Nintendo Wii? Armiñana now has a childhood. He went through puberty. He had crushes on girls. Ruben Armiñana had acne. He thinks jokes are funny.
It reminds me of the scene in "Juno," where Ellen Page's Juno is about to get an abortion and runs into a girl from her class, who tries to dissuade her from going in. She tells Juno that the baby has hair and eyes, but its only when Juno finds out that the baby has fingernails that she decides to opt out of the abortion. It's those little human traits that remind us of the humanity around. Now that Armiñana had entered my world by looking at birthday cards, there was no going back to him as an idea.
There was a purpose to Armiñana coming into the bookstore. He had an agenda. It could have simply been to get a card for someone or even worse: Armiñana could have been bored and wanted to kill time. Armiñana may have gone into the bookstore for the same reason I remain logged onto Facebook for hours at a time.
There are so many titles that are tossed around while on campus: student, customer, user, faculty, administrator, worker, number. These only serve to help distance ourselves from each other. It helps for the hard decisions. It is all right for the teacher to have a furlough for the student's class, as opposed to having a furlough for Trevor Reece's class. It is easy for the CSU to increase the fees of their customer, as opposed to raising the fees of Trevor Reece.
The student/customer is interchangeable, intangible. It has no goal, no life plan. It is a constant term that will always be around. But the person to which it is applied is different. Trevor Reece, student, has plans and life goals. Trevor Reece needs certain classes. Trevor Reece has a graduation plan. Trevor Reece is a student, but the student isn't Trevor Reece.
It is easy to label a group with a derogative term. The student body is apathetic. The faculty is ignorant. The administration is power-mad. But when the individual, the human, is brought into the picture, such damaging broad strokes are unable to happen because the little details of the individual can make a title no longer apply. Nuance kills labels.
The problem with the situation that we are going through is that we are not looking at each other as people. Armiñana and the administration, as well as the people at the top of the CSU system like Chancellor Reed, are looking at people as numbers. Numbers don't have mortgages and plans for grad school. The faculty and the students are, in turn, looking at the administration as suits-and suits don't have feelings.
If we are going to get through this crisis, we as a college, as a state, as a nation, need to start looking at one another as people. It's hard to do, but it is necessary.
If we can see each other as people, we can start to see what is being lost in the cuts and what can be gained in this time of hardship.
I used to not think of Armiñana as a person, but then he showed an interest in humorous birthday cards.
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