Fall Fest. Boy, oh boy. What a day that was. When I woke up on Friday what I wanted most to do was sit in a racecar for .02 seconds and stand in line for three hours for a disgusting hamburger and .004 ounces of potato chips.
It was great standing in a throng of hungry freshmen, but I mean really. Can the University not spend its money on more interesting or relevant events? The University can’t afford to give some faculty voice mail for their office phones. And yet Fall Fest occurred. Looks as though someone’s got his priorities a little confused.
“But,” you say in a bewildered and dejected tone, “what does voice mail have to do with LSU not spending its money appropriately?”
Well, that’s a good question. I’ll first have to introduce you to a little thing called “The Master Plan.” Or “The Bastard Plan” as I like to call it.
While writing today’s Cuff, I thought I would hop on over to the Master Plan Web site to see what official information I could rough up. Turns out the University has no desire for us to know a damn thing about what’s going on with our school. (masterplan.lsu.edu).
The Web site has a lot of pictures of old men leaning over blueprints and a list of dates with no explanation for what’s going to happen on those dates. But the only text available is a paragraph that explains in no certain terms the possible future of LSU (this paragraph is an excellent exercise in useless adjectives, though).
As far as I know, the chancellor [see above: Bastard Plan] thinks that it’s acceptable to spend inordinate amounts of money to renovate the Union, an idea that the majority of this campus does not support and an idea that does not justify the amount of money being spent.
He also approved the spending of however much money for Fall Fest, which provided 20,000 freshmen with the opportunity of a lifetime to sit in a racecar. Does anyone know how much this cost? I don’t. But I can guarantee that it cost more than it would cost to pay graduate assistants a little bit more every semester or to provide a few free textbooks to those same students.
Apparently, it’s perfectly all right to tear down culturally important buildings (i.e. The Women’s Center and the African-American Cultural Center) if those buildings aren’t making butt loads of money for LSU.
Here’s a clue: Mark Emmert isn’t a woman and he certainly isn’t an African American. He is, however, a rich white guy who identifies with those who hate walking for more than two minutes from their car to their classes.
Marky Mark, stop letting in so many students, and you won’t have to build parking garages for them. Hmm … If the University raised its standards, we wouldn’t have so many people clogging our halls and our parking lots, we could justify spending money on academics, and we could maintain a higher intellectual standard in classrooms. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
Off the cuff
September 15, 2003