Poll: 97 percent of CMU students want slogan to change
There is no better-known phrase at Carnegie Mellon than “My Heart is in the Work.” The incessant merchandising is enough to make even the most doomer of CS workaholics convince themselves that this is what they actually want to be doing with their lives. We here at The Natrat are living nothing short of the dream in UC 314, so we know this statement rings true to us. But does the 120-year old slogan still resonate with the campus community at-large? We set out to investigate.
Out of the students we surveyed (n = 3), 97 percent said that they don’t relate to the slogan anymore — that it’s just too dated. Others disagree, saying that it’s part of the campus culture. The Natrat asked those who don’t like “My Heart is in the Work” to come up with a new one that represents the University.
“Hmm… how about ‘My Heart is in the Werk,’” sophomore Andrea Somers said. “It’s fun and quirky and it’s definitely something that little rascal Andrew Carnegie would have said. I think it really captures how on top of everything this school is.” The Natrat sent a team of elite archivists to scour decades of correspondence from Carnegie himself to verify the historical veracity of such a slogan change. In a previously undiscovered 1891 telegram, Carnegie is observed to use the term while writing to Henry Frick about the use of armed strikebreakers against the steel "werk"-ers of Homestead. Purr, Andrew!
“‘My Heart is in the Work’ encapsulates everything I dislike about this school,” senior Josh Pinkington said to the Natrat. “How about ‘Raising Tuition, Lowering Expectation?’ It’s funny because they keep raising our tuition every year yet I somehow still have to teach myself differential equations from a textbook I pirated from libgen.” While the Natrat acknowledges that tuition has been continually on the rise and disavows the use of shadow libraries like libgen.rs, we kindly ask that anybody seeking to levy such criticism consider how else Carnegie Mellon is supposed to afford their next $500 million building.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” first-year Sandra Westington said. “When I first heard ‘My Heart is in the Work,’ something about it didn’t feel right. Unknowingly having to stand in the heart of the ‘My Heart is in the Work’ formation during orientation just intensified that feeling. So I propose we change our slogan to ‘YMCA.’ It’s easy to say, form with a bunch of first-years, and you can put it on a t-shirt.” The Natrat considered this, but to avoid the catching the ire of the YMCA's notoriously litigious legal department we strongly advise against such a change.
But as the campus community is no longer satisfied with our slogan, what comes next? The Natrat urges campus leadership to hire another administrator to look into the issue, form a committee, produce a paper, and have no further change to address this problem.