Very few things unite UTD students.
Other schools have annual traditions and communal events; we have a fragmented commuter campus that has to literally bribe people with free SUAAB merch to show up to virtually any activity.
We do have one thing, though: a truly transcendent love of complaining.
Open any social media app, look around to the back rows of any of your classes, go to enough club meetings — or better yet: attend one Student Government session, and you will feel the community of irk.
Today alone, I was forced a pamphlet and told I would be victim to some “end of end times.” I’m not sure who believes that holding up a sign calling passersbys “heretics” and “idiots” will change minds, but I feel as though maybe the sight of hatred-infused insult is somehow — and this might be a stretch — not a necessary aspect of our already harsh and concrete-ridden visual landscape.
Perhaps there is something in the Richardson water supply that makes campus this toxic. I should know; I do lead a paper known for its critical op-ed section after all. And, UTD does make nonsensical decisions nearly constantly.
But it isn’t just campus. Society is, bluntly, a shitshow as of late.
There is not much we can do to change these facts. Even if I was endowed president (king) of UTD, I think I would struggle to make life better for students.
That all being said, I think I’ve cracked the code — the happiness at UTD. It’s not in the culture or the community but in the moments.
Every day on my path from University Village to campus, I walk through the Modular Labs and smile. Every day, before hours of inevitably sedentary studying, I glance at a small sign telling me that I should not “turn off the lights” because it would “make this building… creepier than it has to be.”
In September I began noticing and documenting these goofy little signs.
In Founders, a recycling can has been taped over with the declaration that “trees are the answer” while FO 2.702 furiously asks, “Where you going with that chair? Put it back!” Thankfully, the class’ sign comes with a footnote that says, “Yes I know, but this probably isn’t a grammar class.”
During your tenure here, you’ve probably noticed a sign or two in a particular classroom but may now struggle to remember where it actually is. That’s because despite the signs’ lack of allegiance to any single building, they are quite randomly scattered across campus. They are intentional. They are human moments.
And perhaps the best part, their creator, remains elusive.
A local article from 2018 attempted to communicate with the signs’ true creator and was unable to secure an interview. I think that’s for the best. It allows the signs to remain personifications of otherwise dull locales.
I don’t think these signs solve many problems or even any problems, but they do add some honest humor to campus in a way no one else is. No Comet could tell the same joke hundreds of times a day. But this signage bears a universal language of wittiness that anyone could enjoy.
Sadly, these signs are slowly dying.
Archival photography from UTD’s Office of Communications shows signs used to dot construction sites, renovations and class halls alike. Much of the signage understandably proliferated during the university’s physical expansion. Yet as campus settled, it appears Facilities Management’s comedic sign-based prowess has too.
The “snake sign” outside Jonsson which discouraged walkers from stepping on off-path thistles — and critically warned that an attached plastic snake may bite trespassers — has fallen apart this year. As of publication, there now exists, to my knowledge, only metal-plated, indoor signs.
Eventually, those signs may vanish too.
UTD should, obviously, address the upper-level issues facing students. We deserve to know what majors will exist before we graduate or if it’s using surveillance technology to track us or if we need an internship to get a degree. But we also deserve to know if it cares about us. These days, it’s hard to say for certain.
If it isn’t clear enough yet, I want to stress this conclusion: these signs are a sign of our campus’ abandonment of personality.
It isn’t any one person’s fault. It’s anonymous in a way. Still, it affects us every day whether you see it or not and — damnit — I’d rather see it. Maybe it isn’t worth laughing at one day, but I’d rather know someone in the administration has tried.
We cannot lose our way. UTD needs to give us the signs.
We should encourage this sort of kindhearted behavior, however minor, from our university. Yes, it is an institution. Yes, it is here to make a profit and drive oblique decisions that will continue to frustrate students and faculty alike. But it is also, on its best days, an institution of human beings — each encountering campus from the perspective of others to facilitate human interactions to learn, to see and to walk through our next stage of life.
I don’t have the answers to the pressing questions of university administration, but I do have one ask: please, do not turn out the lights. This place is creepy enough already.