Twas the Week of Unofficial

The time is upon us again for the annual celebration of unofficial st. patricks day. Dreaded by the University of Illinois faculty as a day of recklessness and disgracing a school's honor, the student body looks forward to this event all year. The premise of Unofficial is that you wake up early and drink green beer and do Irish Car Bombs all day and the big thing is that YOU DON'T MISS YOUR CLASSES! This creates for some interesting events and an unusual amount of public drunkenness on this prestigious campus. There is few things that this university makes an effort to control and this just happens to be one of them. My freshman year there was plenty of fraternity parties (kegs and eggs are amazing) and people drinking and celebrating on any patch of lawn they could find. Green floods the streets and havoc occurs. The havoc however is mostly from those that don't attend the university and are attending from other campuses and cities. They simply don't know how to control themselves here and are giving unofficial a worse reputation than it deserves. This year they have tried to crack down on the bars and stores on campus and have restricted 1 keg per residence and that the bars cannot serve pitchers of beer and shots must be diluted. I am unsure whether I stand behind the universities involvement. It would seem their acknowledgment of the event and taking action almost seems worse than doing nothing and not associating it with the university and its policies.

Another big thing is the Chief. A proud symbol and mascot of our university has been removed and have outraged a majority of the student body. It's a constant debate that I've lived with as in Cleveland we dealt with the same issues with Chief Wahoo! which in my opinion is much worse than the University of Illinois symbol and they have never done anything regarding Wahoo! The students replied with a proper send off to the chief as they mourned at his last game by switching their shirts from the usual school orange and blue to all black, symbolic of the death of the chief. I've recently become a big supporter of the chief and I think its crazy to go against the wishes of the majority of the student body and disregard a large number of alumni that have canceled season tickets to university sporting events and have said they will not donate while the chief isn't here. I'm glad someone has the balls to stand up to the university and make it hurt.

I have to go finish some work right now but I will continue on other current events soon.