Failure fsetival: a success

A cultural anthropology seminar took over East Campus Quad to transform the way that first-year students feel about failure.

Last Saturday afternoon, the students of a class named “Failure: The Culture and History of An Idea” managed a “Failure Fsetival”—spelled incorrectly on purpose—in front of Marketplace, welcoming over 120 first-year students. The festival comprised of events and attractions such as impossible tasks and fail/safes, with the purpose of giving students a different perspective on failure and allowing students to collaborate and create a safe community that nurtures failure.

Erin Parish, the professor of the seminar, has been researching anthropology in history with close inspection of failure for years. “The class is a look at the differential consequences of failure, foundational to American injustice,” Parish explained. This event also served as a launch for the International Failure Institute (IFI), a “new collective of artists, educators, activists and innovators dedicated to the study and practice of failure.” At the same time of the festival on Duke’s campus, similar events were being showcased in the United Kingdom, working collaboratively for some part of the day.

When asked about the failure culture of Duke, one student said, “The fear of failure is talked about more than the failure is actually occurring.” This constant talk about failure amongst students creates a tension that can have adverse effects on the mental health of students on campus. These detrimental mental effects on students were showcased at the festival with the use of an “insecurities education” display. This display compiled the anonymous social-media posts present on Yik Yak that were posted by people in the vicinity of campus. The posts displayed had the motif of being overwhelmingly negative and were followed by fun and encouraging “impossible tasks” that had the intention of changing the space in which failure is viewed from one of negativity to one of introspection.

In the past few years, there has been a huge initiative to deter students from believing in the phenomenon of effortless perfection: the idea that everyone around you has their act together and that they are flawless with little or no struggle whatsoever. The overarching message that the class and Professor Parish want to instill in first-year students is, “That we all fail. We always go around campus thinking that no one else fails, but we need to realize that it happens to everyone. It is not something to be afraid of or to be embarrassed about.”

For more updates on the International Failure Institute, please follow @FailingAllOver on Twitter.

Alex Zapata is a Trinity freshman.