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in thinking about bryn mawr as a radical place, i agree with holsn39 - it isn't. this is a shame considering our history and our potential. we are a school of so many people who are so passionate about so many things, and yet no one rocks the boat. i, of course, have to include myself in this population of non-radicals, and it really started to aggravate me during thursday's class. i came to bryn mawr thinking it would be radical, i was excited to get to be radical with other people and not just be off by myself passionate about a lot of things that no one else has time for (aka highschool). an entire school full of women? that place must be crazy, they must be protesting something every day. in fact, this is not the case at all. sga was once radical, and we still like to tout bryn mawr as the first student led administration or self governing institution, or whatever the exact rhetoric is. but plenary is coming up, and in order to get people to go, they have to close every other food source on campus, hoping to drag bleary eyed, starving mawrtyrs out sunday morning and into the newly renovated goodhart (which cost 19 million to do, and now $20 an HOUR for students to use. why is no one more up in arms about that? i'm angry about the absurdity of paying to use a college space and i have never been involved in theater...). what was once radical is now an obligation. part of what makes plenary so grueling is the length of time it takes out of most students oh so busy lives, most of which is usually spent begging for quorum. i'm sure at some point in our history, maybe even when ortner was here, people were excited to go to plenary. what happened?

comfort. we talked a lot about comfort in class, and i think that's a large part of the problem. we're comfortable. and yes, i cannot presume to speak for every single mawrtyr, but as a population, we are far too comfortable. i just read in the college news that dean tidmarsh's new project (or one of) is going to be to create an even better support system for new mawrtyrs. apparently someone feels that we are lacking support and cushioning. i think this is absurd. bryn mawr has more support and comfort inducing measures than anywhere i have ever heard of or been a part of. not only do these systems exist, they constantly are advertised to us and we are often obligated to at least try to use them (for example, it was mandatory we attend the writing center on a certain number of papers in my c-sem, not because she thought we needed the writing help, but because she wanted us to know how to use one of our many support "tools". honestly, i was 19 at the time, i think if i need help i can ask for it, and if i can't ask for it yet, in my opinion i better learn fast, because in that proverbial 'real world' no one is going to ask me 17 times if i'm sure i don't need any help or maybe want 3 resources there 'just in case'). this comfort leads us to not do anything radical. radicalism comes from a desire to change the status quo. if our status quo is the cushiest place around, what are we going to rally for? women who didn't have the right to vote became radical to earn that right. workers who don't get paid enough strike for more pay to live on. people who are hungry demand food. even in our own history, women not educated in a man's world demanded a place to learn. what do we want? what is the next envelope to push? we are made so comfortable that we have nothing that we NEED to radicalize around? could that maybe be the point - quell the revolution? bryn mawr lives a lot in its history - because we were once so radical, and radically founded, and produced some radical people, it overshadows the need to be radical now, as if we have already served our time as radicals, thank you very much. i don't think this is the case. i think that since bryn mawr was founded as revolutionary, it must always be revolutionary, not just bask in the light of revolutions won. this makes us obsolete. are we really content to be part of an obsolete institution at the young age of twenty something? i'm not, i'm tired of being comfortable. i want to feel toward bryn mawr now, like sherry ortner did then. we make the institution, so what's our next frontier??