Hello again! Sorry for the hiatus... I really wanted to do a post during recess week, but as it turned out I got too busy before I could even start writing. Anyway, I really should be studying right now but I figured if I don't do this post now, I wouldn't ever. Plus the list of things I want to blog about is slowly piling, so I'd like to get things rolling once again.
I'm not sure if many of you would know about the Wall in the Dining Hall saga last semester, but that is what's motivating this post today. Just so everyone is on the same page, the massive dining hall that Cinnamon and Tembusu College shares has a mobile divider that splits the dining hall nicely in two. For a while it became a regular practice to put up this divider, commonly referred to as "the wall". I think the wall was put up every Monday and Tuesday back then... but it seemed like the wall was drawn out on other days as well.
So the problem was that quite a lot of Tembusians seemed to hate it. I didn't like it too much either, because it felt a bit claustrophobic to have such a large space drastically shrink overnight. From what I gather, Cinnamon College had initiated this regular walling of the dining hall, and many people I know in Tembusu seemed to react to that. There were lots of rumors of how Cinnamon wanted to "encourage" intra-college interaction, which, on Tembusu's end, translated to them being snobby and exclusive elitists. Whether or not this was intentional is not the point, because that was what students here felt. In a way, this wall eventually became symbolic of a certain resentment for the elitist appearance of the University's Special People.
This practice of regularly erecting the wall in the hall has since been discontinued, and nothing has been said of it this whole semester. So you might ask me now, what's the point of bringing up this incident? Well, the issue of the physical wall might have ended, but I think there is a greater wall between Cinnamon and Tembusu had always been there, and still stands strong today.
The thing is, this invisible wall exists exactly where the mobile divider runs across. Even without the demarcation, there's an unspoken and (seemingly) universally acknowledged line that portions of the dining hall between the two colleges.
Even without the rage and walls, Tembusu students nearly always sit on their side of the dining hall, as do the Cinnamon students.
The fact is that the colleges are and had always been very distinct entities. This for me is what makes Tembusu's past frustration over the wall moot.
And honestly, I also think this division between the colleges is quite sad. And terribly pathetic. To think that two groups of people can share a common space without interacting! (There are a few who do, of course.) Perhaps what's even more frustrating is the thought of the possibilities from inter-college interaction that we are missing out on. Think of the benefits! By virtue of simply meeting more people, the potential for friendships, sharing and collaboration is greatly increased.
It also opens up the way for resources and learning opportunities to be shared across colleges. Just off the top of my head, I can imagine there being collaborative musical performances, interest groups, publications and stuff. What would be really cool is if we even had inter-college module exchange, where say a student of Tembusu may take a USP module and vice versa.
I must, however, qualify that there seems to be some effort in the direction that favors inter-college interaction. There was mention during Sports Day of the possibility of having inter-college competitions, and every now and then one sees a masterclass or some other activity that does not restrict participation from neighboring college residents. On the ground, it also seems quite some interaction is happening between Angsana and Tembusu, so that's quite encouraging... but, then again, we don't share a dining hall with an invisible wall with them.
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