A declaration was held at Bundaran HI (the Hotel Indonesia Roundabout). Soon after it ended, people stopped talking about what it said and started talking about who had been standing among the participants.

The event, titled the 2026 Indonesian University Students’ Youth Pledge Declaration, was organized by the Jakarta Metropolitan Police (Polda Metro Jaya) to mark the 98th Youth Pledge Day, under the theme “Patriotic, Tenacious, Empathetic: Youth for Indonesia.” The organizers said about 100 university students took part, along with community representatives and several public figures. It was held a day after a student alliance staged a protest on October 28.

The attention came from netizens who noticed that a number of participants were wearing alma mater jackets. One of them wore the jacket of Universitas Dian Nusantara (UNDIRA). After a while, it emerged that the person wearing that jacket was not actually an UNDIRA student.

It’s all too easy to single out one person and consider the matter closed. But this case is more useful if we treat it as a mirror. What it leaves us with is a harder question: how firmly do we stand when someone offers us money to do something we know is wrong? And why can a single jacket cause this much uproar? The answer lies in Symbolic Interactionism, a sociological perspective rooted in the thought of George Herbert Mead and formulated by Herbert Blumer. Blumer proposed three premises: people act toward things based on the meanings those things have for them; those meanings arise from social interaction rather than being inherent in the things themselves; and meanings are continually handled and modified through a process of interpretation.

Physically, an alma mater jacket really is just cloth with a logo on it. But what an alma mater truly represents is the pride of having earned the title of mahasiswa (literally “great student”), a place on the highest rung of education. It’s only fitting that we have a matching wisdom in how we look at the things around us, even the ones that only cross our path.

As students, we do have a duty to maintain our achievements: the grades we chase, the work we produce, and the exhaustion we carry semester after semester. But there is something else, just as important and too often forgotten: guarding our alma mater as a symbol of shared pride. The jacket may look like nothing more than a piece of cloth with a logo. Yet it carries the good name of the students who came before us, the hard work of our lecturers, and, for many of us, the tuition our parents struggled to pay. When that jacket is worn as a pretense, it isn’t just one campus that ends up tarnished. People’s trust in the students who genuinely speak up wears away with it.

Money does buy a lot of things. It can pay the boarding-house rent, cover the fare home, or simply put a good meal on the table at the end of a lean month. We understand that not everyone’s circumstances are comfortable. But money should never be a substitute for integrity, because integrity is the one possession you can’t buy back once you’ve sold it.

For the wider UNDIRA family, this incident should be a reminder. The student organization’s decision to speak out openly is worth noting: a good name is defended with openness, not with silence. Anyone can borrow our campus’s name, but only we can keep it honorable, through small things: being honest with ourselves and having the courage to turn down an offer that doesn’t feel right. Keep your alma mater and your integrity close to your heart, fellow UNDIRA students. Some things money can’t buy: your integrity, and the effort you pour into our beloved campus.