Identity In The Lecture Hall

I sat, sleep-deprived and with a case of the Wednesdays (so close, yet so far…) in lecture for my introductory Bio my professor/lecturer went over the room assignments for our exam on Thursday. My ears immediately perked up. Room assignments? I leaned over to my neighbor to make sure this was really happening, and she explained to me that the class is too big to fit in one room, so they have to split us up. One would think that in my third year at a school the size of the University of Michigan, I would have experienced this massive intro class phenomenon. But I hadn’t, until yesterday. I wondered how an institution that prides itself on producing the “leaders and best,” two labels that require a strong sense of personal identity can rationalize having classes so big that the individual is virtually insignificant. I do realize that, from a practical standpoint, this is the way things must be done. There are simply too many students to have 20 person introductory biology classes. Then I remembered the countless times I’ve seen the extensive “notable alumni” section in U-M literature/propaganda, and wondered how they did it. How were they, in the face of numerous attempts to make them one of the masses, able to retain and develop such strong identities? My only answer is essentially a cop-out: it’s the fact that people like Gerald Ford and Google co-founder Larry Page were able to retain their identities in the face of the bureaucracy and bullshit that makes them such strong personalities. That’s the Michigan difference.