Come on Dan, Sully's had a bad enough week, don't pour salt on him.

I'm surprised you agreed, given the recent history of this particular competition.

Which is ?

Last year one of the contestants sang an aria for the talent portion of the show. Apparently a significant portion of the audience (mostly fraternity brothers and mostly inebriated) decided that because he was a talented singer with a classical interest, he must be homosexual, and voiced this opinion loudly and with strong language, suggesting that he should vacate the stage. To their credit, the sorority girls who organized the event acted appropriately, but the event is still closely associated with the fraternity/sorority community, in which there has been a great deal of homophobic ugliness, and very little effort to combat this. suffice it to say it is not a scene I would care to be seen at as an audience member, let alone as a judge.

So to respond to Mr. Drezner's post, I'm not sure that Andrew Sullivan would be so terribly jealous of you.

For a minute, I thought you were going to say you were judging the International Mr. Leather event in Chicago...

http://www.imrl.com/index.asp

I doubt he would be that jealous -- these are U of C guys after all

One of the creepiest guys I ever met was a U of C fratboy. He more or less confessed that he was a date rapist, saying, "I like to take women to places they don't realize they want to go." He and his group of fratboy friends were quite frightening, in part because they were so smart. It was definitely an evil genius vibe, rather than the ordinary stupid oafishness of other frats.

Why are these girls raffling off Ohio State memorabilia at a U of C event? And autographed by a foorball coach!

I mean, I went to an academic-oriented school in Rhode Island, and our athletics weren't all that great, but people weren't going around raffling off UConn hats signed by Jim Calhoun...

Couldn't they instead raffle off, say, a U of C hat autographed by, oh, I dunno, Ronald Coase?

Anne, they were probably full of it. I always viewed the frats at U of C as some sort of ironic joke. It reminded me of upper-class white kids playing gangsta - they pretended they were at FSU, while doing their best to ignore the palpable Glavin! factor which permeates all things in Hyde Park. Lambda (the Asian frat) did have some pretty good parties, though...

Speaking as an MBA '95 - the phrase "palpable Glavin! factor" is so, so perfect a description.

Just to set the record "straight," although Mr. University seemed to be (for the most part) civil this year, it has a history of being a venue for drunken homophobic frat boys to spew antigay slurs. This was not isolated to one year, one contestant, or one portion of the show, but has in the past been routine. Furthermore, the sorority girls who organized the event did not act appropriately: they continued during the pageant as if nothing were happening and took no steps to prevent this behavior in the future before the queers on campus responded. The lack of bigotry at the show this year is a testament to the way the queer students effectively responded last year.

I marvel that while the gay community at the U of C constantly barrages the campus with its message of tolerance towards them and that gay stereotypes are destructive, fraternity members at the U of C are almost always stereotyped as "drunken homophophic frat boys" or worse without the same outrage.

Dan, I applaud you for being a judge.

Please define a Glavin factor, palpable or otherwise. Thanks.

To set the record straight: About the Ohio State Memorabilia raffle prizes, one of the sorority sisters is related to the OSU coach and I guess it was a good prize to add to the raffle prizes seeing that UC sports hasn't been the most prestigious program since its hay day in the 30s!

A Jim Tressel autographed football will go for $75 on ebay, so I'm thinking the signed OSU stuff was probably the best on the list.

I think I dropped close to a hundred for my Tressel-autographed hat...Of course, that was before the tragedy in Ann Arbor.