“Calvin Memes for CRC Teens” goes viral

Sarah Gibes, Guest Writer|February 22, 2019

A new Calvin meme page on Facebook that began two weeks ago has reached over 1,200 members, most of them students. “Calvin Memes for CRC Teens” was created by Zach Ashenfelter, a junior mechanical engineering major, on Feb. 4, and the group currently sees multiple new posts each day.

One popular post, with over 160 likes and contributed by junior Darian Seale, shows an ima

ge from the show “30 Rock” of a man dressed as a teenager saying, “How do you do, fellow kids?” The caption above it labels him “that one student taking REL-121 as a senior.”

Another post, with over 200 likes and contributed by senior Emily Joustra, is captioned “When it says FullText@Hekman but it’s blank.” The corresponding image is of Frodo from “The Lord of the Rings” saying with a sly look, “All right, then. Keep your secrets.”

“I started the page when I made a meme about Calvin and wanted to post it on Overheard, but I felt like that wasn’t really the place for posting memes,” Ashenfelter said.

He invited friends to join the page, and within a week there were about 100 members, mostly friends and acquaintances of Ashenfelter.

By the second week, numbers had exploded to over 1,000 people joining the group. As a result, the number of memes posted on the page grew enormously, and Ashenfelter recruited Nathan Hall, a junior mechanical engineering major, and Andrew Luker, a junior biochemistry major, to be co-administrators for the group. Both Hall and Luker were original members of the meme page and help sift through the huge number of memes posted on the page.

The meme page has grown so popular, Ashenfelter notes, that the admins decided to turn on post approval to check the “Calvin difference” of the memes.

“Rest assured, it is not our goal to censor or tailor the humor of posts to certain niché groups,” he announced on the page. “Rather, [we want to] create a flourishing page of unmatched content to be enjoyed by those connected with Calvin College.”

Many of the memes on the page are inspired by ideas and events relevant to Calvin students, such as the death of Sid the Squirrel, student debt and Calvin beating Hope. It’s also the only place that students can share a meme with the Calvin College community, thus allowing students to showcase their creativity.

“All the credit for the page getting popular goes to the creativity of the Calvin student body,” Ashenfelter said. “Although we started the page and moderate it, the Calvin student body is the real MVP. We never expected the exponential growth that has made this page what it is. We are truly grateful for the love and support displayed by the Calvin student body.”