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Sunday, January 01, 2006
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THE TELLY UD, faithful readers know, doesn’t watch tv. There’s no television in her house. She doesn’t avoid tv because she’s better than it. She avoids tv because she’s worse. If a television were nearby, she’d piss her life away watching it. So UD’s dependent upon print or the web for university-related tv news, as in the spate of college ads that’s been appearing during football season. Slate has an article describing a selection (you can watch some of them via Slate’s site). Slate titles its piece “Those Weird College Ads,” but they’re not weird. They’re all pretty much the same merry music montage, in which scandal-ridden places like the University of Georgia and the University of Colorado pretend to be scandal-free, and places like Penn State tout their lack of intellectual challenge (“Everything‘s gonna be alright!” goes the pop refrain.). Having followed President Shelby Thames’s despotic rule over the University of Southern Mississippi (Thames has finally been kicked out of office as of next year), UD was amused to read (there’s no link to the ad itself) this description of USM’s ad: The University of Southern Mississippi … wins the Ayn Rand Memorial Self-Actualization Award. What do a pensive painter, a guy in a library, and a woman at a computer have in common? "The courage to think for themselves and a university that fosters it. Southern Miss: Freeing the power of the individual." And they say irony’s dead. |