As a current senior at Saint Mary’s College, my college experience has been unique in that it has been colored by controversy. I encountered the first of the tri-campus tensions that would accompany me for four years during my first fall on campus. These tensions arose when Saint Mary’s and Holy Cross students were included in a tri-campus ticket lottery for the 2021 Shamrock Series game. Students took to Yik Yak to express their disapproval over Saint Mary’s students’ inclusion in the lottery which spurred on hostilities across the three campuses. It was around this time that I first encountered anti-Smick sentiments firsthand. I remember the hot, heavy feeling I felt when my friends and I were greeted by “get them out” after introducing ourselves as Saint Mary’s students at a Notre Dame dorm party.
In the spring of my sophomore year, another controversy erupted when a series of student-written letters stirred up a debate over the identity of Saint Mary’s as a Catholic college. Then last fall, Saint Mary’s gained national attention after an update was made to our non-discrimination policy that was subsequently reversed. Now, in my final weeks as a Saint Mary’s student, my commencement day has been overshadowed by a debate surrounding our commencement speaker. Over the last four years, I have encountered a lot of opinions about what Saint Mary’s is or isn’t. What it should or shouldn’t be. What Saint Mary’s is lacking or wrongly promoting. When I tell someone where I go to college, I often find myself preparing for whatever criticisms may be lurking amidst the response that follows. I won’t be speaking to these controversies because that has not been what my experience at Saint Mary’s has been about. Of all the articles, letters and comments that I have encountered about Saint Mary’s over the last four years, I feel that none of them have spoken to the heart of my experience as a Saint Mary’s student.
I admit that amidst all these controversies, there have been moments when I have lost sight of why I love this place. However, there is one moment that I always come back to in order to remind myself of what Saint Mary’s means to me. This moment came about when I was standing in the kitchen at Our Lady of the Road, a hospitality house in downtown South Bend, surrounded by my fellow Smicks. We were gathered around a big black bowl cracking eggs and the occasional joke. As we filled that bowl with the bright yellow yolks, we reflected on how those eggs had come to be there.
The story of these eggs started in the Saint Mary’s Dining Hall, where every student takes a few extra seconds to scrape their leftover food scraps into a blue bin next to the trash can. These bins are retrieved by student workers every day and brought out to the chicken coop on the Saint Mary’s sustainable farm. The chickens recognize the sight of students arriving with food and hurry over to the fence to eat their fill of our leftovers. Once they’re well-fed, these chickens return to the coop where they lay their eggs. Students and staff members then collect these eggs, organizing them into recycled egg cartons. These cartons are loaded into the trunks of student’s cars and driven to Our Lady of the Road on the first Friday of every month.
Standing over that bowl of eggs, one of my friends remarked, “I love Saint Mary’s,” and she said it with such conviction that I couldn’t forget it. Because Saint Mary’s is the kind of place where students get up before the sun rises on a Friday morning to go make scrambled eggs for our neighbors. It’s the kind of place where sustainability is not just a buzzword, but a real priority. It’s a place where we regard every neighbor with dignity and where we respond to injustice with action. Saint Mary’s is a place where we give the very best that we have: rich, nourishing eggs prepared with joy and friendship, and we give it to those who are in need in our community.
After I graduate in a few short weeks, I don’t think I’ll look back at Saint Mary’s and remember all the controversy or the moments when people in my community made me feel lesser than for where I chose to attend college. I think I’ll remember the image of my friends passing out plates of scrambled eggs at Our Lady of the Road. This is what Saint Mary’s is to me. A place where, true to Blessed Basil Moreau’s vision, the mind is not cultivated at the expense of the heart. I’ll always think of my sisters, poised with their plates of sustainable scrambled eggs, ready to go out into the world to serve. They’ll leave Saint Mary’s as nurses, teachers, ministers, lawyers, scholars, engineers and counselors, and they will leave nourishment and healing in their wake wherever they go. No matter what critics say about my alma mater in the forthcoming years, I’ll never stop believing in the cultivation of hearts that has occurred over the last 180 years at Saint Mary’s College. The impact of her students might not be as flashy or lucrative as some others, but in so many places, Smicks have been the sustainable scrambled eggs that have kept communities filled and nourished. So, as I march into my last weeks as a Saint Mary’s student, my decree will now and always be, long live the sisterhood!
Brigid Hull
senior
Apr. 22
