A favorite pastime for many is an evening at the Memorial Union Terrace, enjoying the lake over a couple of beers in the company of friends.
From the time the snow thaws until the snow arrives a few months later, the Terrace bustles with students, professors and alumni. The Terrace is as much a part of the university as Bascom Hill and Camp Randall. On a warm summer evening, it is difficult to find a place to sit down and enjoy a beer or soda listening to any number of aspiring local bands.
The Terrace, music and beer are interwoven into the culture of the heart of campus, and it would be difficult for most to imagine the atmosphere of the Terrace without the sharing of a pitcher of beer with a group of friends. It seems at times that alcohol is as much a part of the university’s culture as calculus or Badger football. While other universities attempt to eradicate drinking on campuses (often in vain), the Rathskeller serves its patrons proudly.
Last week, the Princeton Review confirmed that alcohol is indeed a part of our university. In its 2006 edition of “The Best 361 Colleges,” the Princeton Review ranked the University of Wisconsin as the No. 1 party school in the nation.
After attending enough house parties, block parties and evenings at the Great Dane, we all can attest our university may very well deserve the ranking.
Some students are proud of the ranking, and some parents of incoming freshmen will have second thoughts about sending their children to their first taste of adult life at the newly crowned party capital of the nation. However, other rankings exist that should calm parents’ nerves.
According to the 2006 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges,” UW is the eighth-best public university in the nation and rated 34th overall. The magazine consistently ranks the School of Education as one of the best in the nation. The Schools of Business and Engineering both have top 10 departments, and languages most universities can only dream of offering — from Arabic to Zulu — are spoken in Van Hise.
Deans enjoy boasting about these rankings (or, recently, avoid mentioning them). It is preferable to look beyond the rankings and see where the true opportunities lie for learning on campus. True learning occurs in the hours spent outside the classroom. Sitting on the Terrace, practicing Arabic over a pitcher of beer, having rowdy and occasionally heated study sessions in Memorial Library or a coffee shop and writing on Bascom Hill are the times to truly digest what was taught in Humanities.
These rankings may hint at the extreme nature of both the academic rigor and the nature of the student body’s use of free time; however, they are nothing more than numbers and statistics. The size of the student body — more than 40,000 — may be daunting to new undergrads as well as seasoned students, but there is more to offer than meets the eye. From hundreds of clubs to miles of nature trails to the Farmers’ Market, the whole city lends itself to being a center of learning, culture and experiences much more valuable than a lecture or house party.
Beneath statistics’ surfaces, UW shows it is still one of the premiere institutions of learning in the United States. Beyond the house parties on Langdon and the cages of Memorial Library, the campus and city provide a world to discover.
Try walking Lakeshore Path to the Terrace and having a beer while typing a paper before the winter chill sets in. Sometimes a Dell, a Spotted Cow and a sunset over Lake Mendota create an intellectual epiphany no college ranking can quantify.
Jeff Carnes ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in linguistics.
