This letter, written for the Duke Chronicle by a former Duke undergraduate and current Miami graduate student about her experience at the Duke-Miami game, is a perfect storm of insufferable behavior.


Michelle Picon is upset because she and her friends went to last week's Duke-Miami game to cheer for the Blue Devils from inside the Miami student section. As you might imagine, this experience did not go well for Michelle and her friends. She claims that before they even entered the stadium, they were harassed by Miami school administrators:

Ladies and gentlemen, I f-ing kid you not, the Dean of Students and the Vice President of Student Affairs stood between us and the stadium, allowing dozens of people to pass us in line as they lectured us on our apparently deplorable and wildly unacceptable desire to show support for our home team. Four-plus years as Cameron Crazies, hard-earned Duke degrees and constitutionally protected freedom of speech notwithstanding, senior administrators of the undergraduate campus dared scold us for wearing Duke blue to a basketball game. The catty, disparaging and immature attitude they displayed during this exchange was astounding. The fact that not one, but two top university officials felt the need to bully six graduate students and attempt to punish us for a lack of "school spirit" suggests an unfathomable depth of insecurity.


Perhaps the administrators were behaving poorly, but can you blame them? Graduate students are the world's worst people, and ones who use the phrase "hard-earned Duke degrees" are even worse than that. (Also, don't know why you didn't learn this at Duke, but Miami is a private school that plays at a private arena. Miami's administrators are private citizens. Your freedom of speech is not constitutionally protected there.) Michelle then goes on to describe how the "fluffy pathetic" Miami mascot threw pizza at her. Oh, and she follows it up with this:

At least our Blue Devil has class.

Ugh. Playing the "stay classy" card as it relates to mascot behavior is the Dukiest and most asinine thing ever. That's like bragging that your dog is a better astrophysicist than your neighbor's cat.

Michelle and her friends did eventually make it into the arena, and were harassed by Miami fans in the student section throughout the game. Who could have possibly foreseen that development?! Here's Michelle:

Unfortunately, the immaturity and spite exhibited by the administration and the mascot was only amplified among the student body. About 1,300 students were in attendance, and I'm sure 1,200 of them had never watched a Miami basketball game in their entire undergraduate careers. Uninspired expletives, homophobic slurs and limp references to genitalia were the only "cheers" I heard from Miami students the entire game. They did not cease during the national anthem, nor during a moment of silence for a deceased member of their own coaching staff. Pause for a second and imagine that scene in Cameron. That's OK-we couldn't either. But what followed was even harder to imagine: During the game, the majority of the students standing near us would physically turn their backs on their own team in order to comment on the size of our penises. Meanwhile, Miami played the game of their lives unobserved. I leave it up to you to infer what these students are really passionate about. Hint: It's not basketball.

Christ. I want to punch those four paragraphs in the face. Leave it to a Dookie to somehow become the antagonist of a story that features a pizza-throwing mascot, bullying administrators, and a student section full of drunk Miami bros.


h/t Brad

[Duke Chronicle]