The Metanarrative of Rollins College

        There is a metanarrative that describes all Rollins students as rich, upper class white kids who wear Vineyard Vines and Lilly Pulitzer; we are all high-functioning alcoholics and cocaine addicts who surprisingly do well in our studies despite our partying habits. The Urban Dictionary definitions of the school is a supposedly all-encompassing narrative about students at Rollins, calling the college a "country club." My personal favorite part is in a sample dialogue, in which a student says, "Lets do some coke and lay by the pool and look at all the hot girls while occassionly watching some sweet wakeboarders on the lake."

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rollins+College
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rollin&defid=1482733

        While these definitions do make a caricature out of Rollins, they do contribute to the school's reputation, which is a part of a metanarrative about Rollins. Lyotard argues that we must "wage a war on totality;" he was completely against metanarratives, as they claim to completely describe a group of people, though they never really can. Lyotard believes that we as a society must destroy these metanarratives because they are no longer all-encompassing, and are therefore no longer necessary. This is true for Rollins College; while I had never experienced Rollins before I came here to go to school, and therefore don't know if the Rollins metanarrative applied to the school as a whole before I came here, it is true that the stereotype of the typical Rollins student is not all-encompassing now. While there are definitely many people at Rollins for whom this stereotype applies, there are also so many people like myself who are not rich and who do not wear "preppy" clothing. There are many students who are the complete antithesis of the Rollins stereotype, who study hard and do not go out drinking every night. Lyotard has a very postmodern view in advocating the abolishment of the metanarrative, because his ideas divide themselves from the idea that society requires an all-encompassing metanarrative in order to define itself. The postmodern belief rejects the idea that our modern society is uniform enough to fit under the umbrella of a single category, as Rollins students are not all the same preppy, well-off students who act out that the metanarrative states we are.