Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi was paid $32,000 by the Rutgers University Programming Association to spend 1/24th of a Thursday talking about her hair, fist pumping and something called “GTL,” which I’m going to guess is her finishing move. 32 Large is $2,000 more than the $30,000 the university is paying Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison to deliver Rutgers’ commencement address in May. I guess it pays better to be a cow than to write about having sex with one.
I think we could stand to have more reverence for things. When I was in school, I got to meet and speak with Ernest J. Gaines and Sister Helen Prejean. Those are really important, life-shaping memories for me. I can’t imagine where I’d be if I’d spent college snickering to myself about how Colleen from Survivor is speaking at our auditorium and how I totally should go.
If this appearance was anything like her WWE stint, Rutgers dropped 32 grand on the word “bitches” and some arrhythmic Go Daddy spinning-in-place.
Let me put it to you this way; to live on-campus and attend Rutgers University, you have to pay the school (as of right now, according to their website) $23,466 a year. Non-New Jersey residents pay $35,222. If you miss even one monthly payment, less than 10% of that, you breach an agreement with the school and run the risk of losing your credits and being kicked out of the dorms. Trust me, I’ve been in that situation. A school will completely cut you off, change the trajectory of your life and put their foot down about it. Now, imagine that the institution willing to sacrifice you in total for 1900 dollars turns around and gives seventeen times that to a drunk pop culture joke so she can say “Study hard, but party harder!” and make a few thousand people say woo.
Kinda makes you want to say f**k it and write jokes on the Internet for a living, doesn’t it?
[AP]
