This semester, writing columns was easy. There was always something going on — a serial killer, a national tie to two big stories and an obnoxious pay raise for our Chancellor. Add to that a bustling national Senate race, and column topics were as free flowing as cheap alcohol in Tigerland.
It was good to see students writing letters to the editor about important things, issues other than “my parking spot sucks” and “well, my parking spot sucks more than yours.”
(On a side note, parking is the least original letter-to-the-editor topic ever. EVER. Students who seek extra points by getting a letter published should never touch this over-expressed topic.)
Alas, we were pretty serious this semester. And now it’s time to poke fun at the news.
For starters, I won’t poke fun at the serial killer, because that just isn’t that funny. I won’t laugh about the one-year remembrance of Sept. 11, and we probably never will.
But the Chancellor’s raise? That’s hysterical. (And sad.)
To be frank, I like Mark Emmert. He’s a pretty cool guy, nice to talk to and straightforward at times.
But he’s not Superman. He doesn’t fly and can’t turn invisible or walk through walls or anything cool like that. Despite what his huge 70 percent raise insinuates, he hasn’t changed the world just yet.
And, using private funding from the Tiger Athletic Foundation to bolster a public official’s salary?
Think of it this way — would you tolerate having part of Governor Mike Foster’s salary paid by TAF? I think not. Emmert’s like the governor of LSU, and we tolerate it when TAF helps pay for his raise? Why?
I shudder to think about what kind of raise they’ll give the man if he actually would implement some life-altering change at LSU that would make us a top tier school, the true Harvard on the bayou or whatever.
But it was awful nice of him to give faculty members a 4 percent pay raise and to start the school on its way to giving graduate students tuition waivers.
I have an idea. If grad students will get their tuition waivers phased in, let’s phase in Marky-Mark’s raise.
This semester also saw more privatization. (Heck, The Reveille even outsourced its Web site.)
LSU now has a Starbucks, a PJ’s and a CC’s. The dancers for the women’s basketball team even are owned — sorry, I mean sponsored — by CC’s.
And while we’re on the subject of the women’s basketball team, take the money you were going to use to go see the men play and buy a ticket to see the women instead. Geaux Lady Tigers, you women rock. (They’ll be the biggest sports story of next semester, trust me.)
Sportswise, I started out this semester with hopes that for both my senior years, the football team would win the SEC championship. Oh well. And Mr. Bertman, I’ll be sending you the bill for the heart attack I suffered when LSU lost to Arkansas.
Speaking of the football team, I think history will remember “The Bluegrass Miracle” as better than it actually was. That play would be as important as people have made it out to be if it had happened against a team like Florida or Tennessee. But against Kentucky, a team we should have pummelled into the ground, it just isn’t that significant. (Maybe we didn’t deserve that trip to Atlanta after all.)
But I’m not all negative — did y’all hear that we beat Florida? The score was 36-7? We played in the Swamp?
It rocked to be an LSU student that night.
It also rocked, in a non-academic sense, to be an LSU student during our back-to-back hurricane holidays. Thankfully, Baton Rouge was spared the brunt of the storm, which allowed many of us to sip liquid hurricanes and sleep in for a few days.