It’s a miracle that I’m still alive, really. How I’ve lasted three years, well … it’s nothing short of a miracle, especially since I attend the notorious “school that kills people.”
Oh wait, we’re not supposed to talk about all of the deaths and accidents starting with the James Cassidy drug incident, my fault. At least people aren’t afraid to walk by White Hall and Forsyth Dental anymore, careful of another shooting across from Stetson West.
Instead of fearing that road, they look to Symphony Road, which still has a somewhat eerie stigma to it for anyone around for last year’s Super Bowl fiasco.
It’s become an understood fact that anytime there is something that holds the potential for an uproar, Northeastern will be mentioned. Any article about college crime or God knows, includes the coveted word “riot,” I can almost guarantee that our school will be blasted in the first two paragraphs.
We should just put a giant sign outside of Krentzman Quadrangle, covering the “Northeastern University” sign saying “Welcome, we kill people, vote us into the Top 100.” I’m sure that would solve all of the students’ and faculty’s problems.
Truthfully, this all is not only becoming rather trite and overdone, but quite aggravating in that within the span of one measly year, we’ve gone from “the co-op school” to instilling fear in pre-frosh with our startling statistics. Throughout the city people, still make jokes about it. When someone asks what school you go to, after uttering the letters “NU” there’s a hush over the crowd and people slowly move away, in fear of a hitman looming behind you in the darkness.
Anytime any big name event comes within city limits, it’s “watch-out-for-NU time” and more money goes to deploying NUPD officers to the streets to make sure students are behaving, or else we all get time out.
Surprising how there hasn’t been anything on the ridiculous nature of the matter. Personally, we all pay far too much money to go to a notable school here to be placed under such a stereotype.
Last week, we made the front page of ESPN.com, not because of our own athletic department (that just would be in another realm of possibility) but because a non-Northeastern student, James Grabowski was killed last year by a non-Northeastern Roxbury native, Stanley Filoma.
Let’s take a minute and read that again. I certainly don’t want anyone to think Grabowski was an enrolled student or Filoma was in any way associated with the university.
Leave it to The Boston Herald to continually get that wrong, nine months after the fact no less. That’s besides the point. The only thing that had to do directly with Northeastern is that it happened within the limits of our “bubble” so-to-speak, and that NUPD couldn’t stop the hordes of Bostonians from pouring into the streets to wreak some havoc. Looking at the ratio of rent-a-cops to those flooding the streets — they didn’t stand a chance.
But something dumb did happen, something that will forever taint the university and, in President Richard Freeland’s mind, keep us from ever getting up into the Top 100.
Does that mean students here that pay the same if not more than other college-goers in the area should forever be the brunt of the city’s jokes?
Not that we don’t partially deserve it, but come on now, being in the spotlight for so long is starting to give those fake-n-bakers an even worse orange glow. Let’s close that chapter and move on, before our school becomes a funeral parlor by day.
— Kaitlin Thaney is a middler journalism major and a member of The News staff.
