Quidditch

What's wrong with a fictional sport, you ask?

Well, quite a bit, when you consider the strangle hold someone else's creative mind has placed over the minds and creative spirit of our future movers and shakers.

Last week I was able to visit a half dozen college campuses along the fabled northeast corridor. In the majority, reference was made to either Harry Potter, Quidditch, or even quidditch tournaments, of all things. The only school that didn't mention this fictional endeavor was a real-world Ivy League institution that is riding the crest of the popularity wave, and doesn't seem to need to support of muggles or wizards to ensure further popularity.

For colleges that wish to promote their uniqueness, and how they allow individual students to blossom into free thinkers, with independently created majors, and universal access to world class faculty, you would think they would have something more in common than a game which involves young adults parading about green space with a broom out their ass. Or is it out there arse, if you want to say it in the traditional English.

Just about everywhere on tour, students, and in some cases admissions department staff, referenced the proximity of their school to the holy grail of media popularity: the Harry Potter legacy.

A student guide at NYU noted that Emma Watson had transferred from Brown. At Tufts, the only reference to 'that university in Cambridge' was to note Tufts' recent defeat of Harvard in some sort of quidditch match. At Wesleyan there were repeated references to quidditch, but, then again, the enthusiastic tour guide just wouldn't stop raving about Middletown, Connecticut, so try and figure that one out. Even at Boston University, admissions staff proudly mentioned BU's contribution to this bizarre world of pop entertainment and dubious athletics.

Columbia, and Columbia alone, deviated from what fast become the norm, and neglected to enter the arms war, or is it brooms battle, over quidditch. But they're in NYC, enjoyed an obscene number of applicants for this fall's entering class, and are riding a wave of popularity not seen since the period when activist Mark Rudd took over the campus in '68 and rocker Jim Carroll dropped out in the mid 70's.

Early childhood behavior experts emphasize the importance of play, and creative activities for children. But that's for early childhood. And while there's an irony in seeing quidditch taking off on all these fancy northeast campuses, it would be even better to see a campus go quidditch free, taking a stand in support of real independent thinking, while helping these coddled kids recognize they are actually adults, after all.

And that's the way it is, as another cranky old man says.