by Joe Marrs
"Loud elitist dorks" . . . the common epithet applied to Plan II students. Any student at the University of Texas (UT) can give you five minutes of opinion on Plan II, whether he knows anything about it or not. The most prestigious liberal arts program in the state of Texas, it seems, has earned little more than contempt among conservative students at UT.
As a Plan II student myself, I naturally resent these stereotypes--but at the same time I have to admit they are understandable. I came out of a small private Benedictine high school straight into UT, one of the largest universities in the country, and I feared the worst entering as a freshman in Plan II. For my first few months I got the worst, too: my Plan II classes were dominated by loud, caustic characters who spontaneously burst into liberal rhetoric, triggered by key words like "God" or "morals" or "gender." One of my more memorable peers in my freshman Plan II English class was an ardent Marxist . He spent the semester in competition with the professor for teaching time: the professor would try to teach us English, he would teach us socialism. One day he came in black-face; I forget why. Other individuals used the open-discussion forum as an opportunity to posture shamelessly, drowning intelligent commentary in their personal agendas. I spent most of this first semester laying low during this class, intimidated and discouraged by the whole circus which I thought was Plan II.
Mercifully, this foolishness ran out of steam by the second semester of the class in the spring. The vocal people in the class had either become comfortable with their status among their Plan II peers, or had simply become embarrassed with themselves and shut up (more likely the latter). With this out of the way, we were actually able to discuss the books we were reading--and the result was one of the best classes I have ever been in. I found that there were some other people actually interested in learning something who had kept quiet earlier. On top of this, I found, sure enough, that there were even normal people in the class! I might survive after all. I even made friends with the Marxist guy by telling him one day after class that he looked like Trotsky. In my two years since then, I have realized how fortunate I am to be in the program.
There are lots of modest, reasonable folks in Plan II--people who don't thrive off the destruction of capitalism, or don't pretend to be struggling under the oppression of the Man (see the t-shirt for Liberal Arts Week, 1997), people who might even have a shred of moral fiber. Most students at UT don't see this, and that is the problem. We see only what catches our eye: the pretentious letter by a Plan IIer in the Texan, the loud guy in the front of class who makes everyone look at their feet in embarrassment when he opens his mouth ("he's Plan II," your neighbor whispers, as if to say, "he can't help it, he's retarded"), or the Undecided, the official Plan II newspaper (which I can't read without breaking into tears). Many of my friends in Plan II share these sympathies; they just don't hope to change anything. I recall asking one of my friends, who is Plan II/Business Honors, if he had stopped by the Plan II office recently. "I only go when I absolutely have to," he replied, as if he was afraid he wouldn't return alive. Some students, including myself on occasion, fear being associated with the program because of the image it has of being the spoiled child of the liberal UT administration. This kind of attitude is the result of letting a select, ostentatious group dictate the image of the Plan II student seen by the rest of the University.
Those like myself in Plan II don't need to be told this; they already know it. We just need to see to it that other people know it. I want the rest of the University to see the whole face of Plan II. I want my peers in the Plan II program to stop hiding behind business honors, engineering, or whatever their concentration happens to be. No longer should "Plan II and proud" ring suspiciously like "gay and proud." We should be as honored to be in the best liberal arts program in the state (sorry Rice and Trinity) as much as we feel privileged to be longhorns. But whatever you do, just don't put one of those bumper stickers on your car that says, "I haven't picked a major yet, but I Plan II."