Insulting Rival Schools for Fun and Profit
Written January 14, 2003

“Why don’t they have Christmas at Western? Because they can’t find three wise men and a virgin on campus.” HAH!

“Queens is a bunch of snobby yuppie-spawn who spend all their time thinking about cardigans, yachts and paying high-end hookers to schlock them!” It’s funny because it’s true.

“How many Laurier students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three, they make it a campus event.” Heh…wait a second.

Chances are that you’ve heard these very same jokes and stereotypes, or ones just like them, countless times at this point in your post-secondary education, secretly revelling in the universally ridiculed weaknesses of other schools and oftentimes taking a stand and defending Laurier from similar onslaughts brought to bear by people you know from those ‘other’ universities.

Rivalries between post-secondary institutions are generally accepted facets of the lifestyle and attitude that students take on, beginning the very day that we threw down that trillion dollar tuition check and first moved into impossibly tiny residence rooms. The Bookstore even condones and encourages competitive thinking by selling items with slogans such as “Friends don’t let friends go to Western.”

Jokes like this are all in good fun but there’s definitely a sense of school pride behind this masquerade, regardless of any personal criticisms of educational quality here. It’s almost like being the parent of an ugly child. You might acknowledge the fact that the poor kid is hideous when talking to your spouse in private, but if some random guy comes up to you on the subway and says “Excuse me Mr, but your boy there is an affront to nature,” you really have no other choice but to retaliate by punching him, or his own children if they are present, in the face. It only makes sense.

Obviously something changed between high school and university. I still remember last year when a few friends came down from London and made depreciating comments about our campus during the entire stay, drunkenly yelling stupid garbage like “Western rules!” out of my Little House lounge window. These were girls who I remember being completely uninterested in high school rivalries, an attitude completely contrary to mainstream media depictions and yet representative of most people I know, and yet they had just arrived from Herpes Village or wherever and were insulting my school? Needless to say, I was immensely gratified when someone in Bricker yelled back, responding with the succinct and devastating comeback mainstay “Western sucks dick!”

So what exactly is altered between high school and university to warrant such an increase in school pride and hostility towards nearby rivals? It’s simple. Money. Where school was once free and taken for granted, we now pay boatloads of cash to study here with the hopes that it will eventually pay off by getting us a high paying job. It’s a huge investment and, just like with any purchased goods, we want to be satisfied with what we get rather than constantly regretting the decision. On top of this, other schools provide competition for top-dollar employment opportunities and threaten the stability of our educational investment. With so much at stake, it’s only natural for animosity to creep into our opinions of rival universities even if it only takes the form of harmless jokes that showcase their various weaknesses and shortcomings.

To wrap things up, I suggest you use this to your advantage. Next time you hear that an unfortunate event, such as a strike, for example, has befallen a university which boasts a particularly good program that rivals yours here at Laurier, be sure to ridicule and expose the weakness for the world to see. Think of it as protecting your future, your investment and your ugly kid.

Meh. Pretty column-lite material but I always thought that the joke emails that would inevitably circulate at the beginning of every Fall semester had to be there for a reason. And everybody liked it when I made fun of Western.