Be Good. Be Orange.

Lauren McCutcheon

  Being Orange symbolizes an assortment of qualities and values for different people.  Whether it be solely for the name of “being a beaver” versus being a duck or some other college mascot.  It could be from a competition aspect for those people; they want to be a part of a sports team community.  Being orange embodies victory, and intimidation; we beat other teams and therefore we are stronger and more elite than people from other schools.  For other people it’s a part of tradition; their siblings and parents went to OSU, and they happen to be next in line.  Then you have the students who come because it’s a party school, and the whole idea is to party hard and see how far you can make it by only meeting the bare minimum for everything you do.  There are people who actually go because of the programs, or because OSU has their major and it’s thought of to be a good school.  For those groups, the value that OSU holds for them is being a success.  Success is a broad term if you don’t explain what it stands for.  Earning your Bachelors’ or Masters’ degree is a vision of achievement for some.  For others, it’s a step beyond that.  It’s the hope of being in the career of your dreams because of your degree, and with other journeys you’ve been through along the way.

Then you have the values and characteristics that OSU wants its students, administrators and other faculty to have and take away when their experience at Oregon State comes to an end.  They put these goals and core values on their website and on other places where the community inside and outside of OSU can view them.  They tell you why going to OSU is deemed a better choice than going to U of O, or WOU or some other school. But if you dig deeper, below the bait they propose to lure people in to either support Oregon State or enroll, what do you get? What do you get out of the school that makes it a better decision than others? One of the core values listed on OSU’s missions, goals and values webpage, is ‘respect’, saying that it means to “…treat each other with civility, dignity, and respect.” Following that is social responsibility; “we contribute to society’s intellectual, cultural, spiritual, and economic progress and well-being to the maximum possible extent.”  Then you ask what “being orange” means for me, and I tell you the two biggest values that I think of: being open-minded and portraying respect alongside being open-minded.   Sure, the two values I say could line up with the goals OSU already bestows upon me, but I would not say that they’re the same.  In fact, the reasoning and substance between “my” respect and what OSU believes to be is respect may be similar in some areas, but there is definitely a different objective behind each one.

During this class, I’ve changed the way I look at the surface of things. In the beginning of the course, I’ll admit, I was definitely hesitant about staying in the class; I approached the beginning discussions like they were a joke.  I didn’t get the objective behind the subjects.  I had accepted that there had been problems with the way the university has been run for a long time, but I didn’t quite understand how this particular “Ethics 205” class would put a dent in the pattern that everyone was used to.

After going through the first few weeks, I started to understand why we were doing what we were doing.  I started to get how as students, in this Ethics class, we could change the way we think and potentially change the minds of the other students around us, and then, if we were lucky, that tidal wave of thinking could reach up into the higher faculty of OSU and beyond.

Being Orange resembles me being a sponge; I absorb the knowledge that will help me, or help me grow in a certain area, and I expel the parts that are unnecessary.  Being open minded is one of the most significant values a person can accomplish.  I now consciously focus on the things that make up the whole picture, and then the picture last.  The values that Oregon State conveys to me are being able to hear ideas that are not your own, and information you haven’t heard before, and being able to engage in understanding what it is you’re learning.   This could also mean retrieving previous information or thoughts that are buried in your brain and mixing it with the new to create something that is your own.

When I said that I think that respect weaves itself into being open minded, it’s because it does.  The amount of respect that you exhibit when communicating with someone else speaks volumes into how much you will learn and how much they will learn.  You can be as intelligent as you desire, but if you don’t have respect for yourself or others, your knowledge is of waste.  People won’t take you seriously because you may come off as not being ethically engaged to what’s important to them, and you won’t take yourself seriously after a while because you won’t care about how the information affects you.

Many people forget that the most powerful weapon that they can use sometimes can be them selves. But our selves can also be dangerous if we aren’t certain of who we are, what we want or what we are afraid to admit.  Being open minded isn’t correlated with being absent of a backbone.  It isn’t about taking everything you hear or read and believing it as sound information.  It’s having the ability to be teachable; to be humble; to realize that more often than not, you’re wrong and someone else is right.  It’s being able to learn and build upon the knowledge you have, and then going out into society and taking action, whether it means inhibiting it, observing it or pushing it forward.

When we went out on our field trip to the Gay-Marriage petition signing, it was good practice for taking considerable notice into what others are involved in.  This includes the evidence they have to support their cause and more importantly, the way they communicate to those who are unaware.   Seeing people fight for what they want personally or empathetically towards someone else is an important reminder that our humanity isn’t failing and we shouldn’t give up on it.  The Gay-marriage event was of good cause, but a major ingredient that lacked in the overall potency of the event was the evidence supporting it.  If the hosts’ of the event had come up to me and told me their story, and why I should sign their petition, I would have maybe signed it, or at least had a change of heart.  But for the hosts’ to prematurely assume that it’s visitors would just sign the paper because “it was the right thing to do”, exemplifies their lack of moral imagination.

A growing issue in our present society is not being ethically engaged or interested in what happens outside of our bubble, or even a bigger issue for some; being ignorant of our inner most selves.  Oregon State represents a foundation for students, administrators, faculty and alumni, to obtain the knowledge they need for their degree or their personal lives, and then use it.  I used to not enjoy Bacc core classes or even find them necessary; why should I be forced to take classes that I don’t want to take, especially when they don’t have anything to do with my major or what I want my specialty to be?  But I think I have philosophically figured out what they hold for those who want to take something away from them.  They provide people with the opportunity to be thoroughly developed in a range of ideas and perspectives.

OSU wants it’s students to be able to be accountable to their ignorance, and absorb the information they will perhaps need eventually.  Taking a speech class may seem obnoxious during the time you are involved in it, but being able to communicate effectively and support yourself when people ask why they should sign your Gay-Marriage petition definitely makes it worthwhile in the end.  Or being able to write to the OSU President and explain why you don’t think tuition should be raised can be a lot more beneficial and operational if you’ve previously learned how to write a good argument in a past Writing 121 class.

Being able to grow in the areas of being open minded and displaying respect can heap respect and relativity from others towards yourself.  And that’s what we’ve been learning in this class during the whole term; how to learn something and be able to show others how to think about it more ethically, and in turn enlarging the spectrum of the cycle.  That being done as students at OSU. That’s how people will know that we are different from other schools.  Being orange envisions that we are open to change, we are open to “different”, and more importantly we are open to growth.  And if someone doesn’t agree with us along the way, then we will show them respect, because sometimes all humanity needs to remember is that respect exists. And sometimes, respect is the very thing that prompts people to grow because they remember that it is possible.