Saturday night at 10 p.m. as Southern Miss celebrated a 38-22 victory over Appalachian State, Hattiesburg revealed the fault lines of campus identity. At Brewsky's, Greek life toasted another football win—our best start in years at 2-1. Across town at Fat Cat, hundreds of students packed in for Emo Night, screaming My Chemical Romance lyrics with religious fervor. Two tribes, one campus, radically different Saturday nights.

This is no coincidence. It is the inevitable result of a university that has prioritized football as the singular expression of institutional identity, leaving entire swaths of student life to fend for themselves in the cultural wilderness.

It is undeniably magical during football season at Southern Miss—the way strangers become family under black and gold, tailgates where conversations flow as freely as the beer, the electric current that runs through campus when we’re winning. This unity is real and intoxicating. But it is also suffocating in its totality.

When football dominates every conversation, every email, every budget meeting, the theater students perfecting Rhinoceros in Tatum Theatre might as well be performing on Mars. Honors students conducting research that could reshape their fields get a paragraph buried in newsletters, if they’re lucky. Our musicians fill Marsh Auditorium with breathtaking performances for smaller audiences every year.

Our institutional priorities are laid bare in our very infrastructure. We can fund massive stadium renovations and athletic facilities that gleam like temples, but walk past where PRISM, our former center for diversity and inclusion, used to operate and you will see the opposite. It has been “transitioning” into the Office of Community and Belonging for what feels like forever, stuck in bureaucratic purgatory while students who desperately need those resources navigate campus without them.

This isn’t an accident. It is a deliberate decision that some forms of community matter more than others, that some types of belonging are more valuable than others. We are tied to the Brett Favre volleyball facilities that became national scandals, but diversity programming gets caught in endless administrative reshuffling.

The irony is suffocating. We celebrate football’s power to unite us while systematically defunding and deprioritizing the very offices meant to ensure that such unity actually includes everyone. International students whose countries don’t worship at the altar of American football, LGBTQ+ students seeking community beyond the heteronormative tailgate culture, working students who can’t afford a day off for game day, and athletes who participate in sports other than football are all told that their Golden Eagle identity is lesser, secondary to the main event in the stadium.

This monoculture doesn’t just exclude some; it impoverishes all of us. When campus identity becomes indistinguishable from athletic performance, we reduce the complexity of higher education to a simplistic scoreboard mentality. We’ve created a university where intellectual curiosity plays second fiddle to fourth-quarter comebacks. We tell prospective students, faculty, and the broader community that Southern Miss is, fundamentally, a football program with some academic programming attached.

Universities should be ecosystems of ideas, creativity and diverse forms of excellence. Instead, we have created a system where football reigns as the cash crop and everything else struggles for sunlight in its shadow.

The question isn’t whether Southern Miss should love football less; it’s whether we have the institutional courage to love everything else more. Because right now, we’re not a university with a great football team. We’re a football team with a great university.

And that’s a loss no touchdown can fix.