Passing by NIU’s entrance while due west on Lincoln, I observed, yet again, the erection of a massive edifice on either side of Castle Drive—a design the purpose of which I finally placed as an identifying facade of prodigiously ostentatious opulence.

Turning to my companion, I remarked, “When this thing is finished, going onto campus via these portals will be similar to entering Las Vegas.”

“Yeah. Just as profitable for the school,” was his reply.

Welcome, all ye newcomers who enter here, most of whom seem to think that this school was built for the sole purpose of letting you run amok, sans underwear or anything else, in sybaritic display of crazed bacchanalia.

Indeed. Drunken revelry may be an absolute requisite to your surviving the college experience, as I would be the first to admit. Crass stupidity, however, is an entirely different thing, particularly where those monster Huskie buses and the insane pavement etiquette which has seemingly been adopted by you, the bumper crop of fresh-faced babes in the woods who are currently going for what is a very nebulous pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, are concerned ….

And, enough rambling. The Star won’t allow it, and anyway I don’t have the time for it, either.

But this must. It’s time for you dweebs and dweebettes to get your coddled heads out of the clouds of what has been a pampered existence of perpetual “Thy will be done” gigs, and come to the belated realization that the university is, first, really a dangerous place, and second, really, really inconvenient.

As to the first particular, there are times when our esteemed drivers of the fleet are going to get, ho, so fed up with your petulant insistence that they stop on the dime just so you can have the right of way, they will just mash the accelerator flat and lean forward instead of reacting with the expected subservience of a menial lackey.

As one driver recently put it, “This is the worst incoming crowd I’ve ever seen. All over the place, students are waiting for a gap in traffic so they can cross to where ever it is they’re going to, and are generally respectful of ordinary automobiles. Let a Huskie bus come up, though, and they instantly step right in front of it, almost as if they have some sort divine right because of our connection with ‘their school’.”

Ah, yes … and the second particular: don’t push your luck. No argument, no matter how logically sound or sugarcoated, will convince a driver to deviate one inch from the scheduled line of stops, and whining about it will just rouse the Beast that slumbers within each and every one of them. And an inspired amount of homicidal madness just may be the result.

See, we want to keep you economically viable, er, alive.

Welcome to Law Vegas ….

Greg Brown

NIU Alumnus