In her amazing piece for the Washington Post, The Daily Tar Heel's Arts & Culture Editor Ramishah Maruf finished with this heartbreaker: "The school's response to this global pandemic has left me wondering: Did it ever love me the way I loved it?"
I'm here to give you the answer: no.
Now, you may (or may not) know me as the guy they republish here every year for the home Duke game — an article I wrote in the early Triassic period about why I hate Koach K's Klown Kollege over in Durham. (If you're asking, yes, my loathing still runs as deep, if not deeper.)
I've written for some of the biggest newspapers and magazines in the country, and now my wife (also a UNC grad) and I make television in Hollywood. I say this not to brag about us, but to brag about the hundreds of Carolina friends that helped us get there, and a hundred more that populate the bars and houses of wherever we happen to be.
In short, we're the best. Yes, I've heard people who went to Brown liked it. Georgia and Alabama have rabid fan bases, and everyone at Hastings College knew the state song of Nebraska. But after traveling around the world and living in every time zone, I can go ahead and call it: we win.
My older brother would see so many Carolina grads doing favors for others that he derisively called it "the sky blue mafia." Look around at every discipline. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting one of us winning awards in journalism, science, sports. We give TED talks and testify against Supreme Court justices.
My 45 best friends — even now that I'm 177 years old — all lived in Hinton James, or Lewis, or Morrison, Granville, Cobb, on Rosemary Street, Cameron, McCauley. We are attached by a thousand loose wires. But there is one thing we should probably tell you, though: we all hated the University.
In August, when the administration forced all students back into close quarters, amid blinding puffs of shed coronavirus, we all screamed, "for God's sake, don't do this!" Within days, there were quarantined floors full of moaning freshmen, and fancy dorm foyers started looking like the Spanish flu scenes in Downton Abbey.
I was horrified, but not surprised. There has always been a massive divide between the essential experience of Carolina, and the people who run it. I loved every second I was there, and hated the University administration every one of those seconds.
