On a college campus, ghosts are everywhere. Friends from freshman year, old lab partners and campus celebrities haunt the streets. It is impossible to walk more than a block without running into an old acquaintance.
This is both a blessing and a curse. In four years, ghosts accumulate faster than you can count. Running into old friends brightens a day, but when enemies could lurk behind corners, every turn is a Russian roulette.
Connectivity exacerbates the proximity problem on campus. Ghosts don’t exist in the digital age. With a first and last name, anyone can be traced through social media. If you’re generous with your phone number, ghosts haunt your messages too.
In these close quarters, sending a cursory “thanks, but no thanks” text can make downtown or on campus seem less like a haunted house. Yes, obviously honesty is the best policy, but that is an idealistic proposition amongst a population that tells, on average, one to two lies a day. Sometimes, when we say, “I’ll text you,” we really mean, “I’m going to forget we even had this conversation.”
What do we owe to other people’s expectations?
People’s emotions are delicate. Handling them respectfully protects your reputation and creates a loving community that surrounds us in State College. Avoiding awkward moments and tension requires clarity.
Still, a formal goodbye sometimes feels a little stiff or unnecessary. Does a happy medium exist? Maybe a set of ground rules can place boundaries around the morality of ghosting. No matter how polite you are, though, gaining closure doesn’t always balance out the vulnerabilities and opportunities lost.
It’s almost impossible to graduate college without ghosting or being ghosted. Until graduation, these ghosts linger in our lives, shaping our college experience and paths to class. The ethics of ghosting remain murky—sometimes, silence is the kindest response; other times, it’s an abdication of responsibility.
It’s best to navigate these close encounters with empathy, setting boundaries where needed while recognizing that no one truly disappears. Instead, they fade in and out of our periphery, as we float in and out of each other’s lives.
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