There's a rumor you hear as a freshman that the dorms were built from slightly modified plans for a penitentiary.
After exploring the maze-like bowels of Ellicott, it's not hard to believe.
There's also a rumor that North Campus was built to prevent students from gathering beyond a critical mass, in an effort to avoid possibly violent protests.
After walking from one end of the campus to the other, and failing to find large groups of students socializing, it's not hard to believe.
Whether these tidbits are fact or fiction, they are still useful because they reflect the feeling of virtually every freshman when they arrive on campus - isolation.
When one arrives at UB, especially coming from a small high school or an otherwise tight-knit community, the experience can be dizzying.
You're no longer John Smith, but 29615429. You don't leisurely arrive at school and go to class, but scrap for a non-existent parking spot and try to figure out which of these identical buildings is Knox.
As students at a university with 17,000-plus undergraduates, we immediately face an uphill battle to connect on a communal level. An unattractive campus, stifling bureaucracy and a distance from the city or any notable culture can leave one alone in a sea of 17,000 faces.
Of course we all make friends, find common interests, and pursue plans for the future. College is not a time for isolation, and we all form social bonds.
But our isolation persists in some ways - student unity on any particular issue is usually pathetically low.
We pay $160 a year to fund the Student Association, but less than 10 percent of us normally vote for the officials who will spend the resulting multi-million dollar budget.
We pay $4350 a year to SUNY, but how many of us are paying attention as our tuition is increased and our aid is reduced? How many of us know who the SUNY Chancellor is, or that he got his job through a political connection without notable higher education experience?
We have a president dead set on endless war against the tactic of terrorism. Few students take notice, even though they'll be the ones on the front lines if things continue on this path.
Bush is stealthily concentrating power in a heinously un-American way - but for most students, the words filibuster, judicial confirmation, Patriot Act, redistricting and media consolidation don't mean a whole lot.
Even the students who support Bush do so passively - aside from the relative few who join the College Republicans and/or send me angry letters, there is not much solidarity to be found there either.
On a campus designed to keep us apart, we must struggle harder to come together on issues important to us all.
The potential for students on this campus to effect change is enormous and unrealized.
Student protests had a large part in ending the Vietnam War and changing history.
Our collective voice is strong enough to change how the SUNY system works. It's been a decade of tuition hikes and reduced public support, and the results are showing - a recent report put UB in the bottom third in terms of graduation rates when compared with 15 other public research universities.
We have been granted a tremendous opportunity to get an education here, and it automatically bestows a responsibility upon us to make sure this opportunity is available for others. Apathy will do nothing to ensure that.
Just because UB was originally designed to keep us apart, we don't have to stay that way. Given our current social upheaval, the opportunity to affect change will never be better than right now.
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After three years, this is my last column for The Spectrum. I want to thank everyone for reading, especially those who took the time to write back - positively or not.
Photo: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki
