Remembering the flags that used to be in the Bishops Lounge

For nearly 40 years, an array of nearly 50 international flags was displayed in the different community hubs on campus. What does their presence then–and their absence now–tell us about Southwestern’s relationship to its international students?

When I arrived on campus in the Fall of 2021 from my home country of Uganda, one of the first things that stood out to me was the array of flags that hung from the wall of the Bishop’s Lounge in the McCombs Campus center. As an international student, I knew that when I decided to attend this small liberal arts college in the middle of Texas, I was more likely to find myself out of place than the majority of my peers, some who were only a 30 minute drive away from their childhood home. I was surprised to see such a diverse collection of country flags in a building marketed as “the heart of campus,” which sparked my curiosity as to what they represented.

As I asked around those first few weeks, some students had no idea why the flags were there, indicating that they had practically ignored their presence over the two, three, or four years they had been on campus. Others suggested that the flags represented all the countries American students had visited during various Study Abroad trips. It was only after speaking with someone from the Study Abroad office that I learned that for over 40 years, the flags had represented all the nationalities of the current and former international students who enrolled at Southwestern, but that practice had faded away.

Revisiting the origin of the flags this semester, I learned the first flags were once mounted in the old Round Commons building to represent currently enrolled international students, and in the ballroom of the Student Union building to represent the international alumni. Both buildings were recognized as the social hubs of campus at the time before they were replaced by McCombs Center, which for the first time in Southwestern’s history combined the Student Center and the main dining hall into one building in 1998.

Starting in the Fall of 1984, an annual event was organized where international students would hold flags representing their native countries and carry them through the Commons to be placed on the wall. Students sometimes sang the national anthem of their country, or talked about the symbolism of their flag. That first year, there were 22 international students representing 14 different countries: Brazil, Canada, France, West Germany, India, South Korea, Malaysia, Iran, Mexico, The Netherlands, Panama, Peru, Singapore, and Sweden.

Titled “The International Flag Ceremony,” this became an annual event where international students would participate regardless of if their nationality had been represented in prior ceremonies, but students from countries that had not been represented before would get to add their country’s flag to the wall. That meant that the flag display accumulated over the years, serving as a materialization of the collective memory of the role of international students at Southwestern.

Although the flags were placed in the SUB and the Commons, the ceremony often took place in the Mood Bridwell atrium. In 1989, the Director of Multicultural Affairs Dr. Gregory Washington spoke at the event to talk about how it gave Southwestern “an opportunity to remind ourselves, as a university community, that we are members of a global society. The display of the flags is a way of demonstrating our recognition and appreciation of the multicultural community represented here.”

Over the years, the job of producing the Flag Ceremony shifted first from The Office of Multicultural Affairs to the International Club, an organization of international students and students interested in international affairs, and then finally to Friends of the International House. The Friends of the International House was a student organization dedicated to recognizing the legacy of the International House, which had burned down in 1987 but lived on in several smaller-scale iterations through the 1990s, something detailed in a series of other Placing Memory entries.

The last mention of the Flag Ceremony is in the 1992 edition of the Sou'wester Yearbook. By 1994, an article by Amy E. Wendling, a Megaphone staff member, marks the purpose and presence of the flags as one already forgotten by most Southwestern students just two years later.

Despite the loss of the Flag Ceremony, the flags maintained a place on campus, being moved to the Bishop’s Lounge when it was rebuilt as part of the McCombs Campus Center in 1998 after the demolition of the Student Union and Round Commons buildings.

That’s where they sat until the Fall of 2023, when I returned to campus to discover that the flags had been taken down and replaced to display the US flag, the Texas flag, and a Southwestern Pirates flag, mirroring the flag poles just outside the building on the Academic Mall.

Reflecting on the affect of the absent and replaced flags from the Campus Center prompted me to reconsider their purpose. During my first year living in the US as an international student, I became highly aware of how prominent the national flag is in American culture. Hung from houses, pledged to in schools, printed on a large variety of apparel, and weighed down by a multitude of rules about how it is supposed to be used, the symbolism and materiality of the flag holds a strong place here.

Growing up in Uganda, I had minimal interaction with my own country’s flag outside of its presence in government buildings and the occasional history lesson. Many of my friends from different East-African, European, and Asian countries agreed they had a similar lack of interaction with their home country’s flag, affirming the unique nature of the American flag for many of its citizens.

The Flag Ceremony represented a merging of cultural practices, where international students represented their nationalities in a manner respectful to themselves while integrating some of the American culture that surrounds its flag. It celebrated difference by performatively including symbols of international identity, but in a way that made sense mostly on the terms of mainstream American culture.

I have come to see the experience surrounding the International Flag Ceremony, and the placement of and eventual displacement of the various national flags on campus, as a kind of materialization of Southwestern’s evolving ideas about Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity.

The presence of the flags in the 1980s and 1990s affectively portrayed the celebration of SU as a multicultural community. Other events organized by the Office of Multicultural Affairs were used to discuss the challenging nuances of studying at SU as an international student while navigating the influence that both local and global events had on their lives. Keeping these events separate was accepted because there was value derived from the positive representation of multicultural identities on campus.

The absence of the flags in the minds of students in the late 1990s through the 2010s, suggests a changing attitude towards the ways SU navigates being labeled as a multicultural community. Reflecting on my own and my peers’ experiences of attending DIBE-focused events these days, I suggest that students feel a greater sense of Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity through events that bring the community together to discuss the nuances and challenges of studying at SU as someone outside of the majority, reinforcing the idea that SU is becoming more diverse.

Although celebratory events are still organized, their affect becomes interpreted as more performative, especially as we consider the shift from student-led DIBE events to institutionalized DIBE events. Gaining an awareness of this distinction led me and other students to question whether these more celebratory events were for us, or for the public promotion of Southwestern as a diverse campus. The performativity in the presence of the flags is heightened when we consider how the multitude of national flags never accurately reflected the total number of international students enrolled at any given time.

Today, I feel that the absence of the flags affectively portrays this conflict amongst students questioning the legitimacy or the performativity of DIBE initiatives over the course of their institutionalization on campus, providing some unique insight into the changing perspectives of what it means to “Belong/be Included” as a minoritized person at a diversifying Predominantly White Institution (PWI).

By recognizing the contrasting affects produced by the presence and absence of the flags, my documentation of their history on campus attempts to highlight their presence as the materialization of the accumulated history of international students at SU. While I argue their absence portrays a changing attitude toward the ways we celebrate SU as a multicultural community, I would like to end with a question: to what extent does the absence of the flags from a campus community space erase both the collective memory of international students and the complex history of diversity initiatives in general at Southwestern?

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