Written by Amelia Slater
“Campus celebrity” is a term I love to use. The cafeteria worker who made my quesadilla is my campus celebrity. The girl who wrote the funny Bison article is my campus celebrity. My favorite professor is my campus celebrity. The physics tutor is my campus celebrity. If you have an ounce of significance in my mind, I view you as a famous person in a way of respect and admiration for your stand-out qualities.
A campus celebrity is often someone whom I admire from afar, someone I will point out to my friends on campus, someone who may seem untouchable in my eyes. Usually after my initial star-struck feeling subsides, I will serendipitously end up meeting this person and maybe hanging out with them. In the best cases, I will end up having made a great friend with someone that I can still praise for their initial celebrity qualities.
An example of this is Malachi Brown. My sister was a Delta Nu member who graduated last year, and she would come home at every holiday break when I was in high school and tell stories of her club and their beaux. I had heard about Malachi, and to me, he was the ultimate campus celebrity. My first week on campus, I remember seeing him and being giddy as if he were my favorite celebrity. As time has passed, and I have gotten to know Malachi through friends and street tacos, I am no longer a spectator of him. I am proudly just a friend, and isn’t that great?
It is silly now to think about how many times I have been nervous to meet someone because they are such a beloved person. This pattern has repeated with many people and professors across campus as I have acclimated to Harding life. This year, my friends Helen and Randi and I have been eliminating social media from our lives. Randi and Helen initiated it because they noticed how social media made them judge people based on how they posted, and they wanted to get to know people based on who they really were. In following their lead, I have found my tendency to revere others as celebrities to fade the more I stay off of my phone. I think this is for the best. As fun as it is to make this little Arkansas life more interesting via the people around me, I think I would rather just get to know people for their normal qualities and let them just be themselves rather than an idealized version in my mind. Hopefully pushing away this celebrity paradigm will allow me to value others without a hierarchical lens and instead to tell people when I admire one of their qualities. I have yet to delete social media though, so for the time being: You are my campus celebrity.
