Valeria Reyes

Every day as I walk around campus — whether up the hill or between classes — my mind returns to the same perplexing thought: Colgate University has a ginger problem. Not “ginger” as in the spice used in trendy kombucha, but ginger as in the red-headed, freckled, Vitamin D-deficient population who have multiplied at an alarming rate in recent semesters.

While other higher education institutions boast diversity in race, gender and thought, Colgate has yet to confront its disproportionate saturation of carrot-topped individuals. The administration remains conspicuously silent. The Office of Equity and Diversity offers workshops on cultural competency, but when students raise concerns about the campus being visually overpowered by shades of copper and auburn, they are silent. 

Of course, one can’t blame Colgate entirely. This is a regional issue. According to the Press & Sun-Bulletin, nearly 20% of upstate New York’s population identifies as Irish Catholic, a rate more than double the national average of less than 10% reported by the U.S. Census. In other words, Hamilton itself is ground zero for ginger density, a kind of Ellis Island 2.0 where every freckled great-great-grandchild of County Cork has converged, armed with a Claddagh ring and an allergy to direct sunlight.

Instead of confronting the overrepresentation head-on, Colgate has quietly folded it into campus culture. The bookstore carries an unexplainable four-leaf clover merch line. The history department offers a surplus of Irish history courses. Students can find an overwhelming amount of extended study or semester abroad options in Ireland. And the dining halls play mysterious amounts of Ed Sheeran.

But as the red tide continues to rise, Colgate is faced with a choice: acknowledge the carrot in the room, or risk forever being known not as a university on the hill, but as the largest open-air ginger preserve in North America. 

The consequences are everywhere. Whitnall Field is littered with sunburn casualties after a single April scrimmage. Dining hall lines grind to a halt as students demand “authentic boiled potatoes” at the vegan station. The campus squirrel population now seems exclusively red-furred, as though even the local wildlife has been recruited into the cause. And yet the university persists in pretending nothing is wrong. 

And then there’s the calendar conspiracy. For the past several years, Colgate’s spring break has fallen suspiciously — some would say strategically — over St. Patrick’s Day. Is this a benevolent gesture, gifting Irish-descended gingers their holiest of holidays without fear of academic penalty? Or is it a darker form of suppression, shipping the carrot-topped masses out of Hamilton to prevent the town from being swallowed by a Guinness-fueled parade? I cannot say for sure. What is clear, however, is that no other holiday receives such convenient administrative choreography — a suspiciously generous nod to the ginger lobby rumored to control the registrar’s office.

It begs the question: with such an overwhelming amount of gingers, where is our annual Ginger Run? Colgate, with its statistically unmatched quantity of flame-haired students, has failed to organize the most obvious campus tradition.

There could be SPF checkpoints instead of water stations, and the finish line could serve free potatoes and ginger ale. Hamilton businesses would surely thrive: Kinney’s would post record sunscreen sales, while Bar Bar and the Hourglass could sponsor carrot juice shots for participants. 

Until such an event is instituted, however, the ginger population will remain under-recognized and under-utilized, which I believe is a wasted marketing opportunity for Admissions, if not a public health hazard. Due to the administration’s reluctance to address this head-on, Colgate’s ginger problem will remain an open secret, glowing (literally) under the Hamilton sun.

Of course, full disclosure: I myself am ginger. Yes, I write this not as an outside observer but as someone personally implicated in Colgate’s red-haired renaissance. Perhaps this is less an exposé than a confession. This is a cry for recognition, or maybe for a campus-wide discount on aloe vera. I can only hope my fellow gingers will forgive me for airing our freckled laundry in public. After all, sunlight already does enough of that.