In the weeks before returning to Tufts, the town neighboring my rural Illinois hometown became swarmed with commotion. As the home of a university with nearly 25,000 kids, I've grown up accustomed to the chaos accompanying the return of college students mid-August: sudden lines at Target, the abrupt influx of North Face-clad youth carrying MacBooks and our own meager version of "traffic."
Growing up, it always seemed natural to separate myself from these students. The younger you are, the more rigid the barriers that age seems to construct. The kids at "the University" were compartmentalized as "college kids," a foreign and intimidating category with whom I felt little in common. This summer, however, I had the unsettling realization that I was at least as old as most of these students. These kids, I realized, are living a version of my own current life, in a separate time zone and with different professors, but with the same general shape and structure.
The night before I left for Tufts, I went for the first time to a local bar to say goodbye to some friends from home. "So, do you live on campus or off?" a girl standing nearby asked. When I replied that I was actually from the next town over, the student snickered. "Oh," she said, while scanning the crowd for an easy escape. "You're a townie."
As she scampered off to a group of peers, I was unsettled by a situation that felt so familiar, and yet my role so very foreign. The incident did not sting as it might have under different circumstances — with half my bags packed for my senior year at an academic powerhouse, it seemed laughable to entertain the girl's assumptions that I was a hillbilly or uneducated, or that our proximity to corn and soybeans somehow rendered my table of friends inferior to her own. It did, however, aggravate my already developed frustration with a term that is widely used and shockingly, rarely criticized.
I have never been a fan of strict political correctness. I am annoyed when friends from outside the Tufts bubble are met with judgment and scolding for some of their — admittedly distasteful — vocabulary choices, and I think there is a balance between respectfulness and excessive sensitivity.
What I do find galling, however, is the real dissonance between our self-righteous liberal claims of tolerance in theory and our practices that are speckled by exceptions.
It is not so much the actual word, but rather the condescension with which it is usually said, and the context in which it is generally brought up. It is the implication that the pub wasn't as fun, that the party was sketchier or the group lost their appeal, simply due to the presence of individuals from the surrounding area.
You would be hard-pressed to find a Tufts student that would claim their relative superiority because of socioeconomic upbringing or educational prowess. We claim solidarity with the women in villages in Africa and with the immigrants fighting for equality in border states. And yet, while it is easy to proclaim our tolerance for groups in far-flung regions, the same sort of philosophy doesn't come into play with our own neighbors. It is hard to deny that Tufts students are in a place of relative privilege, and consciously or not, we invoke this status as a stark boundary line between "us" and "them."
Our current "townie" attitude is contributing to an unfavorable perception of our student body, and fueling an animosity that is translated into noise complaints, bitterness and most regrettably, crimes targeted at our students. If we want to realize our proclaimed goals of active citizenship and social responsibility, there is no better place to start than in our own backyard.
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Amanda Johnson is a senior majoring in international relations. She can be reached at Amanda.Johnson@tufts.edu.
