In physics, vertices are defined as those points where particles collide and interact. At Boston College, they provide the name for a seminar taught by Kerry Cronin, the director of the Lonergan Center at Bapst Library. The seminar focuses on life issues, particularly in terms of interpersonal relationships.
The class may be best known for its infamous dating assignment, a project Cronin began three years ago to entice students to give dating a try. She calls it an exercise in being countercultural, a chance to confront the "hook-up culture" she finds at BC.
Cronin began the assignment three years ago after talking to a group of students about the lack of dating at BC. She found that dating in college "had become a lost art, and no one knew how anymore." So she challenged her students to do a simple thing: ask someone out on a date.
Cronin found that students didn't find the assignment a simple task at all. "The problem," she says, "is that dating isn't a part of the social script anymore. It's become something strange, and scary."
The lack of a dating script, Cronin says, can be attributed to the broader hypersexualization of Western culture over time, in which "sex has been made casual and dating has been made formal." One of her students in the Vertices seminar, Annie Kurdziel, A&S '08, agrees. "The idea of dating seems so foreign to our generation," she says, "and you really have to put yourself out there."
Cronin acknowledges that the changes that have diminished the prevalence of dating have also been constructive. The increase in women's independence, for example, has led to a focus on career and friendships rather than dating. Nevertheless, she says that "somewhere along the way, I think women's liberation and the commodification of women has been confused."
She cites the model of Sex and the City as an example of this confusion. Models such as these, Cronin says, "show how feminism has been corrupted … and have completely decimated the possibility of dating."
