College has always been known as a strange tenure in one’s own life. In many respects, this particular chapter will determine how proceeding chapters will play out. Some people pick up the salt of the earth from their bare feet and become hippies. Others pledge fraternities, get their asses paddled in some bizarre ritual and are thus forever interned into whatever randomly selected Greek letters they have decided to adopt.

Who’s to say what course is the proper one to take, certainly not an emotional invalid like myself. Different strokes for different folks, and oh, how many strokes there are. There are those in college only looking for the pre-med, Amherst College sugar-daddy or sugar momma (I include myself in this category) who, while seeking this, take on an inane major like communication, sports management or something obscure like the history of western literature.

The ability to offer a multiple number of perceptions is probably the greatest attribute of University of Massachusetts. In spite of these budget cuts and the problems with the honoring of contracts, where else can gays strut their flamboyance freely, and a lesbian shave her heads without ridicule? Certainly not in Eastern Mass.

Strange things happen when nobody gives a damn. People begin to take on their true colors. As students, many of us being from the loathed eastern parts of the state, it’s important to take these colors into consideration. The greatest importance of living in a college town is this accepting outlook on life. Sure, there are those who will expect financial retribution for returning your cell phone to you. But you ignore these needle heads and embrace the rare spices of human condition around you.

When I went to the University of Connecticut, for the longest year of my life, there was a case down there of some locals roughing up a college student because he happened to be walking past the rainbow center. I tried to imagine in my head what type of people would carry out such atrocities at UMass, but I just couldn’t comprehend it. For one reason, the guilty party would be so busy busting head that they’d have knuckles as purple as a junior high kids in an unsupervised study hall.

As students, we have a right to be experimental, to be accepting and to be, dare I say, liberal. College breeds many humanitarians; that’s why, in case you haven’t noticed, so many cars stop at cross walks around here instead of just driving over them, as we do so often in the evil eastern part of the state. Out of all the verbs conducted in anyone’s college career, the most important the verb: “to be.”

For Shakespeare, this action was the greatest of all contemplative questions: “To be or not to be?” To the Romans, there was no more important verb than “to be,” and they had all sorts of ways of saying it: sum, sumus, eram, eras, eramus … Romans viewed the state of being as the most essential attribute to your animus, or your soul, the only thing that was free from the powers at be, and the only thing worth dying for.

College should be for everyone a matter of soul searching. College isn’t all about classes that teach you bull shit rhetoric and worthless equations. College is the search for genuine identity, which is really why a college diploma looks so good on a resume.

We are the representatives of a higher intellectual class; our actions classify our social beliefs. And are we going to close our ears to Noam Chomsky? Ignore Howard Zinn? And decide not to listen to Built to Spill, Modest Mouse and the Dirt Bombs because it’s too emotional?

The great carrot of modern civilization is Brittany Spears and “Reality” television. To bit upon these banes will make you a slave, a beast of burden to a rotten system of exploitation. Your soul and self-identity will be consumed by the wave of conformity, which if you haven’t already noticed is profitable to others. Forge your own character, though it maybe hard, and make your college education worth your while.

Robert Carey is a Collegian columnist.