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Woodruff PE Center | Photo by Jason Oh

This is how you find school spirit at Emory, the college with no football team: first go on a school tour and listen to your tour guide claim, “Emory may not have a football team, but we, um, have school spirit,” and the sentence trails off as she stumbles onto her next topic. Walk around and see the pretty buildings and the DUC. Go inside and see how privileged these students are. Food everywhere. Study spaces everywhere. Shuttles to a satellite campus that’s a 15-minute walk away.

You’ll notice the quiet. This campus is silent. On Wednesdays, they pump music through Asbury Circle, but so loud that the racket drowns out the people. You see so much beauty here, but you can’t hear the people.

Go to a tennis match. Go to a basketball game. Go watch the club volleyball team, and see parents cheer and students mill around, but all the students compete. Present because they’re needed on the playing field.

The other students you see work out on ellipticals, run on treadmills and pedal on recumbent bikes with their backs to the match because the gym equipment forces them either to bring their own entertainment or to stare at the backs of a few idle frat houses. A student may tell you to check out the frat scene. People get loud there. You’ll find Emory spirit there. Give this advice a chance.

And are the frats loud! You can’t hear your friends talk, so you nod. Dance. Drink enough that when random people approach you it feels not only normal, but as if this is how life should always be; attention comes to you with ease.

Embrace the night. Scream! Share your Emory pride. You’re partying because the football team won a big game today. Oh, wait, no. Because the basketball team … no, they’re not in season.

Maybe the tennis team won. You assume the tennis team won, so you drink to that, dance to that and nod at your friends’ moving mouths to that.

Not that you need anything more than good friends to have a good time, but here Emory stands, a swarm of Eagles screaming in the night. But why do we perch our passion in the light?

Comb your hair. Dress yourself in something nice. Pack your bag, but not too full, because you need to look debonair. Emory is a preprofessional hotbed. At this school, you don’t flaunt anything akin to reckless SEC football pride. Your existence is concerned with grades, internships and how to handle all that stress. So you eat too much adequate food at the DUC and head to the quad, where you can moan away your stomachache in peace. There’s a girl under a tree reading a book and a guy sprawled out on the grass poking around on his tablet, but otherwise people walk past the campus’s maybe 100-yard field of grass, and they hardly make a sound.

Now go. You had to park at CVS because you didn’t want to pay to park on campus. How much money? Too much money. CVS tows, so you don’t have much time. As you hustle to your car, you wonder how many millions sit in the Emory endowment. Billions? Of course you have to pay to park. A school with this much money knows how to make money. Emory does not walk to the beat of E-A-G-L-E-S, Eagles! Emory hustles to the rhythm of cha-ching, cha-ching.

But trust that Emory has its moments. We volunteer throughout Atlanta. We work on campus and around the community. We host events, support good causes and combat hate when it comes our way. But those callings divide us – in the name of goodwill, yes, but divided still. We flock to Decatur, Midtown and the Clairmont campus to fight our good fight.

We disperse to bring the Emory spirit to the greater community. So we have spirit, yes we do, but we spread ourselves so thin that we can’t be heard like the dense, deafening roar of a college football stadium at 12 o’clock on a Saturday. That’s okay, because our spirit touches more places than the spirits of most schools.

A gust of fresh air and a warm sun urge you to sit by Asbury Circle, and you realize what the lack of sports culture does to this school. Everyone wears a different outfit, as opposed to some fervid assortment of blue and gold, so you can’t shout, “Go Eagles!” and get a heartfelt holler back. No, Emory is not that school.

Emory is where you sit, watch people pass by, and then a girl you know approaches. She’s with a friend. You’re on the phone, and you stare at your friend, thinking you’ll say hi – you used to know her better, but still well enough to say hi – and as your friend passes she stares at the ground. Her friend notices you and maybe wonders why you’re staring at her friend.

You wonder if your friend will look up and say something, and you realize that you keep your mouth shut too.

– By Alex Rosenfeld, a College senior from Allentown, Pennsylvania.

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The Emory Wheel was founded in 1919 and is currently the only independent, student-run newspaper of Emory University. The Wheel publishes weekly on Wednesdays during the academic year, except during University holidays and scheduled publication intermissions.

The Wheel is financially and editorially independent from the University. All of its content is generated by the Wheel’s more than 100 student staff members and contributing writers, and its printing costs are covered by profits from self-generated advertising sales.