Opinion: We Should Cancel Classes for More than just Meaningless Sports Victories

Monday afternoon classes were cancelled to make room for a celebration for some championship the women’s baseball team won over the weekend. While I can understand the desire to not want class, this cancellation highlights a glaring problem: class is not cancelled for enough events, and certainly not the ones that matter.

It’s downright hypocritical to cancel class for something as obscure as a national championship while not recognizing the everyday victories the rest of the student body achieves on the regular.  Yesterday, my friend Brad maxed out all 16 meals for his meal plan this week.  Do you know how hard that shit is? And yet there was no class cancellation to celebrate Brad’s monumental achievement.

Celebrating even one additional student slogging through the struggle that is everyday life has much more of an impact than some game involving people throwing balls into hoops.  While most of us know we’ll never be as good as the players on the baseball team that won that “important” championship, we can all find hope in other students mildly succeeding every once in a while. Alicia attended her 8:05 for the third time this month?  Cancel class.  Steven only spent five minutes in line at Moe’s?  Cancel class.  Caroline got a C- on her accounting test after going DT the night before the exam?  Cancel class.  These victorious moments in life need to be celebrated, not merely skipped over.

I understand some students won’t care.  They’ll say these moments are trivial and meaningless to the rest of the student body.  They’ll say the money we spend on tuition would be better spent going to class.  But they’re wrong.  The students that say this have already given up on college, life, and themselves.  They should be forgotten like that championship thing we won recently.

Some of us are here to enjoy life.  It would be nice if the school respected the thousands we pay in tuition by cancelling classes without a clear public safety reason for every personal victory a student achieves.