Lily Huynh/The Cougar

With the semester coming to an end soon, students are once again facing the dreary atmosphere that comes with finals and reflecting on the months spent tirelessly working. While the Cougar’s incredible March Madness run this year certainly built up hype, this academic year has seemed to lack a sense of energy overall.

School spirit is important for any university’s community, but between UH’s lackluster responses to crime and flimsy student support, it’s continued to dwindle, and it has every reason to.

To anyone on campus, it’s obvious how unsettled the student body has been. Within the last few months, there were multiple major crimes at UH, including rape, sexual assault and robbery.

The rise in crime has been damaging enough, but many have been discontent with the University’s actions following these incidents.

Protests were organized shortly after, and demands were made, but even during these events, students worried that they would ultimately be disregarded. Even protesters outside of these have expressed concerns about silencing or not being taken seriously.

This was also a concern following the suicides at Agnes Arnold in 2023 when the University’s only response to the tragedies was to recommend CAPS until students protested their inaction.

Given this, why would any student discontent with the state of their school, feeling as if they’ve been ignored by the institution for years, have any pride in being at UH?

Students also lack integral support, with consistent complaints being made online about things like the DART Center and CAPS. The application processes are extensive, DART accommodations are sometimes ignored by professors and little to nothing is done to fix this.

These issues aren’t new. Year after year, students continue to express concern over school policies, unhelpful administration and plenty of other things that would lead anyone to be discontent with their enrollment.

The question is, will UH make the necessary changes to bring back school spirit? It’s not unreasonable to assume not.

Truly, it’s hard to care about an institution, let alone show much school spirit, if it shows at every turn that its students and their well-being have little value. If UH wants anyone to be prideful about their time spent here, something needs to change.

Parker H-B is a sophomore journalism major who can be reached at opinion@thedailycougar.com

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“Declining school spirit is in the hands of UH admin” was originally posted on The Cougar