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Skandalaris Football Center

As I was photographing this last night, a couple of male students walked by. I didn't catch all of what one said to the other as he waved his arm at this building, but his remarks had to do with the expense to which the University (or more likely, actually, alumni) goes to honour its athletic accomplishments as opposed to something else. I didn't make out what he said but I imagined it was probably something like, uh, educational achievements.

On almost every football game day on campus, tens of thousands of people come from miles around to attend not only a football game, but to party hardy before, during and after the game. Many come to watch the games on their wide-screen televisions as they cook their dogs and burgers and guzzle their favourite beverages. When all is said and done – win or lose – the campus is trashed. Bottles, cans, water bottles, wrappers and garbage of all ilk lie in the wake of a football game.

I have seen people drinking as early as 8:00 a.m. and fall-down drunk as early as 11:00 a.m.

This is all permissible because of the revenue it brings to the University and to East Lansing.

It is nothing short of remarkable, really, that places such at MSU are considered places of higher learning. They have become the NFL's minor league; they have become the research facilities to the major corporations, who not only receive the benefits of comparably cheap labour (read: underpaid and overworked graduate students), but they are able to write off most (if not all) of what they contribute as grants.

I guess that I wouldn't go so far as to say that my college education wasn't valuable. After a year or so of treading water, I finally discovered that visual communications was a field I could get excited about. That was good, I guess. I was glad for the social interaction (and, admittedly, occasional drunkenness) and for some of the things I learned outside of my major. (I can still recall the five words my psychology professor wrote on the board for a memory demonstration over twenty-five years ago.) But as I look at so much of what I see on this campus (just as I did when I was in school), I wonder who came up with this "higher education" bullshit. I imagine that these drunken clowns are going to be the lawyers, doctors, politicians and captains of industry for the next forty years and it puzzles and saddens me.

</disjointed rant>

At night.

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(I do not understand why when I create the large/on black link – whether at BigHugeLabs or decluttr – that the large version appears for me at the time but not for others OR for me afterwards. So... I'm creating my own on black images using screenshots of the BigHugeLabs version since it includes the title and copyright notice. Note that clicking on the image won't bring you back to this page as it's a static flickr URL.)

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Uploaded on Nov 9, 2009

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