In an episode of the old Star Trek, Captain Kirk and crew beam down to a planet that looks like an old frontier town. Its people wear 19th-century attire and walk slowly along the sidewalks. They carry books that look sacred, call everyone “Friend,” and ask outsiders if they are “of the Body.” When the clock tolls six, however, these uptight townspeople suddenly become a raging mob. They tear off hats and coats, and start fist-fighting, throwing stones through windows, screaming “Festival! Festival!” As Kirk and his men soon learn, the Festival—“the Red Hour” it’s called—is a twelve-hour, all-hell-breaks-loose outlet for the normally reserved, controlled inhabitants.
Rose-Hulman may never be visited by the Enterprise, but it certainly has its own version of tightly wound inhabitants letting loose. Most of the time, Rose students walk purposefully through Moench and Olin, sedate and staid. They hold laptops that seem sacred, and though they may not call everyone “friend,” they do use words that make outsiders realize they are not “of the Body,” things like “Disco,” “ADES,” and “Meatballs.” Maybe it’s uptightness, maybe Midwestern conservatism, or just maybe it’s overwork, but the natives’ manner can strike observers as otherworldly.
In contrast to their regular demeanor is Rose’s Festival, when the clock strikes and students and alumni cut loose in a mass of scheduled frenzy. Each October, during Homecoming, there’s a bonfire so large the airport reroutes traffic. The sheer size is impressive—creosote-soaked and alkane-drenched railroad ties built up into a tower that’s four or five frat-boys high, atop which perches a wooden outhouse. But more impressive are the traditions of revelry around the actual event. Freshmen build it. Sophomores tear it down, or attempt to. Guards are posted, who stay awake all night to protect it. Damage is soon repaired. At night, fraternity brothers run naked. Alumni show up trashed. There is alcohol, there are pyrotechnics, there are flaming arrows, there are cellphones and digital cameras, and there is, if you ask the natives, “friggin’ awesomeness.” A grad student in a shiny heat suit walks in to toast marshmallows. Otherwise intelligent people reach in to touch the flames. There may not be fist-fighting or stone-throwing, but at Rose’s Red Hour, the sane and smart, those studying to design and create, go temporarily mad in a fit of orderly destruction and chaos.
What is curious about Star Trek’s Red Hour and Rose-Hulman’s Bonfire is that both events appear to invert completely the inhabitants’ usual values. Sanity and hours of work, a schedule governed by bells and textbooks, all are traded for all-nighters and pyromania. And yet both events happen over a short time-span with a clearly defined beginning and end. Both are thoroughly scheduled events with a structure, clear rites and roles and regulations. And both events, in the last analysis, end by encouraging the values they appear to undermine.
What values do engineering students need? Careful attention to processes and standards. Sleepless dedication to detailed, step-by-step work. Comfort in the predictability of a Newtonian universe. Thought and reason.
What values does the Bonfire instill? The same. It takes attention to reenact the building of a precarious tower year after year. It takes dedication to keep watch with a Nerf gun, especially with hours of Calc homework to be done. For alumni, there is comfort in returning to campus—names change, but the pattern remains. Creation, destruction; create, destroy. By repeating the pattern, students respect those who came before and those who will pick up the torch (no pun intended) in years to come. Even drunkenness and nakedness, even the risky touching of fire, all of which run contrary to routine, reinforce the notion that everything has its place and time. Those drunk and naked are not drunk and naked in the lab (thankfully), but are actors on a stage, which reinforces the point that Festival exists not to counter, but to support the “real world.”
One could argue, of course, that the Bacchanalia of the Bonfire is an insurgence of counter-values Rose expects its students to also hold: camaraderie and joie de vivre. But the fact that a space has to be created (then destroyed) for such an outburst of life and fellow-feeling underscores the point that life on Planet Rose does not emphasize zaniness and zest for life nearly enough. After the bonfire, just as before, we are belled patiently where we are supposed to be, submitting work when and how we are supposed to. Temporary drunkenness makes it easier to reinforce sobriety. We build a very professional bonfire.
At the end of the Star Trek episode, Kirk and Spock explode the computer that had controlled the minds of the natives and made them sedate. By destroying it, they allow the natives to turn their Festival—their whole culture—into something new. What that something new is, the episode doesn’t reveal, but one hopes the wildness of the celebration might become less all-or-nothing.
So cut loose, by all means. Burn big. Burn bright. But zest for life and camaraderie do more good if they’re diffused throughout the year. I’m not advocating blowing up any computer, nor do I think there’s any mind-control going on. I’m just saying: what if our own Festival weren’t a yearly inoculation, but a daily dose?