We learned last week that the perfect recipe to boost Husky spirit has a few key ingredients: a few hundred willing students and a good idea.

Clothing is optional, and at the underwear run last weekend, it was discouraged.

It was encouraging to see our fellow Huskies in the freshman quad running, cheering and breaking out into chants. It resembled a sentiment rarely expressed around Huntington Avenue – pride. Perhaps any positive Husky energy created that night transferred over to Parsons Field, where the football team won their home opener against Delaware.

This is progress in an area where many Northeastern students feel slighted, especially at a semi-large university with a blooming campus. The most important point to be made is where it came from, the student body, where true school spirit should come from. In a college landscape devoid of a strong culture and fully engulfed in the urban landscape, it’s good to see spirit evolving from the students, and not manufactured elsewhere.

But the approach many at Northeastern have been pushing lately is less organic. The push to manufacture a spirit of culture through events, committees to raise homecoming awareness and now, free T-shirts for students who attend hockey games don’t get anyone excited, they merely give a committee something to do and administrators something to take credit for. It’s store-bought spirit, bought and paid for with tuition, and we resent it.

The “Diehard Dog” T-shirt, made through a collaboration of the Student Government Association (SGA) and the DogHouse, hopes to “set the tone for Northeastern school spirit,” said SGA President Rogan O’Handley. While a T-shirt may, or may not, turn out to be the force that binds us as Huskies, it’s doubtful it will have the same effect the communal taking-off-of-clothes did – hundreds of students running, and when they stopped, screaming “Let’s go Huskies!” to their hearts’ content.

Creativity is important, and there’s no better place to find it than the student body itself. SGA can give out their T-shirts, Northeastern can schedule their homecoming pep rally, but we’d rather run in our underwear.

The only way to get into the spirit is to let it rise up from the students. We’re smart kids, as we’re constantly told by SGA and the Northeastern administration, and we can spot fabricated sentiments that reek of bologna from miles away.