I don’t understand why people wear Whitman College sweatshirts at Whitman College. Sensibly speaking, there are two 1-2 reasons people tell me to defend wearing a Whitman sweatshirt at Whitman.

1. To represent Whitman College
The problem with this statement is that you are representing Whitman College at Whitman College. It is a clear redundancy if you already attend the school. Walking up and down the streets of San Francisco, someone wearing a sweatshirt that says San Francisco on it is usually a tourist who realized too late that it wasn’t 70 degrees and sunny. Additionally, the way Whitman students generally dress already separates them from Walla Wallans who only wear Carhartts if they are actually doing heavy duty work. If anything, wearing a Whitman sweatshirt at Whitman makes it seem like you want to separate yourself further from the Walla Walla community.

1.5. To show people you go to college (like a pretentious asshole)
This is 1.5 because it has the same tone as the one before and doesn’t involve physically being on the Whitman campus. People assume if you eat in Prentiss Dining Hall and carry books around that you go here, which is valid. Why wear a Whitman sweatshirt –– to grow your higher education cult? Put out representatives? Ridiculous. Do we have to go around pretending to be better than other people with our college that no one abroad or on the East Coast has even heard about? Regardless, it seems counterproductive to represent a small self-selecting liberal arts college. Self-selecting means people go looking for a school like Whitman, but not from what some kid is wearing on the bus or at Powell’s or at the mall. Yeah, I’m glad you love your tiny college that sends droves of students not to law school but to the Peace Corps.

2. To stay warm
This is simple. There are other things that keep you warm other than college regalia. Otherwise many of us would never be warm and never would have been warm in our earlier lives. Yes, the sweatshirts are warm, but you cannot deny what you are communicating when you wear one. Would you wear a sweatshirt that says “I like to fornicate with goats” and assume no one reads it?