This weekend, Homecoming celebrations and fall festivities abound at Case Western Reserve University, offering opportunities for visiting alumni to commemorate their time spent on campus and for current students to create memories of their own. But there’s an activity that might be even more popular among the CWRU student body—studying.
“I feel like the school’s lack of school spirit isn’t necessarily due to the school, it’s more so due to the people. I feel like people like to keep to themselves here,” Second-year Eyoha Teshome said.
As students, we are always meeting a deadline or—when we’re not doing homework—taking part in extracurricular activities. Though that contributes to our school spirit, it’s not one that can generally be felt throughout the community. CWRU students often shape their experience to how they see fit without being inspired by CWRU pride itself.
“The biggest thing is community,” second-year Navika Sharma said. “We have got to get more students wearing our school colors and [showing] school pride. We need more activities that bring people together.”
In life, the road to success isn’t a lonely one. It usually is a collective effort. With community involvement, our own pathways to success will feel more meaningful and rewarding. And though it is up to us students to display our pride, it takes more than that. The arrangement of more community events and spirit-centric rituals can inspire the student body to represent our school. We might get a slice of what it means to have school pride from Homecoming, seeing alums representing our school and community, but this is not nearly enough to sustain us for the entire year.
We’ve all noticed the increase in the new CWRU logo scattered around campus, a branding strategy that has left a lingering taste in the mouths of many. After all, we are all aware that we are at CWRU, so who is this message for? Throwing money at our logo won’t solve our spirit problem—that comes from within. To make better use of administrative funding, incentivizing students to align their actions with the school’s core values, or the organization of more large-scale community-based events would be good places to start.
“We are very low-key when it comes to sports. When there is a low sports turn-out, there’s going to be low school spirit with that as well,” Teshome said.
Making sports games a bigger deal could exponentially influence the pride we experience as students. Despite current politics threatening the administration with funding cuts, it seems the school has more than enough money to pay for marketing additions to campus that provide nothing to the student body but a big blue eye-sore.
The university is clearly aware of the lack of school spirit on campus as seen by the creation of the CWRU Spirit Committee. In 2024, the committee and University Marketing and Communication birthed Blue CWRU Fridays as an effort to “spur school spirit across campus.” Special shirt designs were made for purchase, and faculty and staff were incentivized to “dress down” with any CWRU apparel. That the school must provide an incentive to encourage the university community to partake in showing school spirit is telling. If we wish for it to be more than surface-level, the willingness to change should largely and organically come from the student body.
Further, you can’t gain school spirit simply by donning the school colors and wearing the apparel. Spirit runs deeper—it’s holding a sense of pride for the community and campus around us. And it is difficult to cultivate this pride when it seems that decisions made by administration are often isolated from student voices (such as through seemingly random marketing decisions) or at odds with student requests (such as recent changes to meal plans, diversity programs, residential living and expression of free speech).
“I’m sure [the lack of school spirit] has affected those who were really involved in school spirit [in high school],” first-year Althea Amon said. “I think my high school had more school spirit than Case Western does.”
First impressions are crucial. CWRU could put in a greater effort in acclimating its incoming students by facilitating more class interaction. There is an innate age-driven hierarchy at most educational institutions and it should be leveraged to the advantage of guiding first year students toward greater success. If the upperclassmen do it, everyone else follows. So, if the upperclassmen embody the spirit that is the missing puzzle-piece to our school pride, others will do the same.
More and more students may see attendance to school events as low-priority. It’s easy to feel apathetic towards our community when most students are caught up with deadlines and studying for upcoming exams. This results in a domino effect. It is up to us and the administration to facilitate a shift from a focus on ourselves to our greater community and seeing the bigger picture that we’re all in this together.