LETTER: Spirited jacks provide refreshing outlet

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by Paul O'Brien

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To the editor:

So, here we have it: the end of O-Week jacks.

Some, including myself, have argued that the jacks give new students the wrong impression of what Rice University is all about.

Others have argued that the jacks are exactly what student life is all about and that O-Week is a unique time to express it without the overwhelming burden of academic pressure.

I agree with the Thresher staff editorial of last week which stated that jacks provide a necessary initiation into Rice.

After discussing this issue with my roommate, I am conviced that jacks' most essential function is to strip new students of the well-known pressures of maintaining such academic performance as is sufficient to be accepted into this university.

Some, before entering this institution, have striven hard, dedicating inhuman efforts to the pretense that such labors will be rewarded with acceptance into a selective university.

After suffering through this ordeal, these students are rewarded with what? One of the hardest four-year curricula in the country.

This condition suggests that the stress will only build and various breakdowns will ensue.

At Rice, it may be suicides, at Harvard, murder, but ultimately, most people cannot stand eight years of constant pressure.

So, at Rice we've invented O-Week as an opportunity not only to become familiar with our new home, but also to restore ourselves to a more reasonable pique.

Jacks are the primary device employed in the battle against burn- out.

New students and advisors get a week-long chance to vent their stress.

Unfortunately, either as a result of a more stressful admissions pro-gram or as the simple result of yearly escalation, recent jacks have clearly gotten out of hand.

Not too long ago, however, Rice students accomplished the greatest jack in recent history, the turning of Willy's statue; hardly the act of juveniles.

Perhaps we need to take jacks as an opportunity to put our much-hailed wits to mischievous ends rather than to simply be as destructive and vulgar as possible.

Perhaps we should replace jacks with some other venting scheme.

It is my opinion that the highly enlightened members of the O- Week Review Committee should use their vaunted intelligence to come up with a better, safer, more appropriate way to cleanse the new students of their stressful baggage.

If we are as clever as our entrance exams and diplomas say we are, we can come up with a viable alternative to destructive jacks.

We need not be crippled by such a childish problem -- we can do better.

I've had enough of the new American creed: The problem is too big and too hard to solve.

This is not the time to throw our hands in the air and throw out a good tradition, but rather it is the time to prove our mettle and forge new traditions worthy of our university and ourselves.

Paul O'Brien

SRC '97

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the February 2, 1996 issue.

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