Less than two weeks into his first semester, freshman Timothy McPherson (SFS ’18) delivered a rousing oration yesterday in Leo O’Donovan Dining Hall about how he would “fix” Georgetown to his classmate over lunch.

“I said something about how the chicken was kind of dry, and that just seemed to set him off,” said Chris Nielson (COL ’18), another new Hoya who begrudgingly agreed to grab lunch with McPherson after their Problem of God class let out.

With a look of smug self-assuredness on his face, McPherson—who has eaten at Leo’s twice since arriving on campus, but heard countless upperclassmen verbally degrade the food situation—remarked that the “food situation on campus is a joke.”

“For what we pay for our meal plans, the food they serve in this dump is pathetic,” said McPherson who has only eaten at the pasta station at Leo’s.

“The solution is obvious; I don’t see why Jack DeGioia doesn’t do anything about it. All they need to do is scrap Epicurean and convert it into a dining hall run by a different vendor than Leo’s. Capitalism always produces the best result; I learned all about it in my microeconomics class.”
Drawing upon the two sessions of ECON-001 he has thus far attended (one of which was devoted entirely to reviewing the course syllabus) McPherson then proceeded to expound upon how competition in the marketplace would yield either higher quality food or lower prices.

The freshman, whose only experience with Georgetown social life was excitedly waiting an hour to get into Club Lau and fifteen minutes “busting some sweet moves,” went on, “And that’s another thing: my micro professor doesn’t know how to turn on the projector in the room. I don’t care if he’s got a damn Ph.D., why do they have someone that clueless on the payroll?”

To this, Nielson suggested that the professor must be tenured.

“Oh, don’t get me started on tenure,” McPherson, the one-time winner of an honorable mention award at a high school Model UN conference, began. “That whole system is just a useless vestige of the medieval university. Georgetown needs to get rid of tenure all together and make knowing how to run PowerPoint one of the criteria for professorship.”
“By this point, I was done eating,” Nielson recalls. “Tim didn’t show any signs of slowing down though, so I just sat and nodded to be polite.”

McPherson, who sources confirm bought all his recommended textbooks through the university bookstore, then ran through a litany of perceived problems with the university that he could “easily fix.”
“And what’s the deal with this Northeast Triangle dorm project?” McPherson asked. “Do they just want to get rid of all the green space on campus?” he queried, although he really wasn’t sure where it was going to be built.
“Plus, all this construction makes it a pain to get to class. They shouldn’t be building this new dorm, they should just convert Koobler Coogan,” McPherson said, referring to the abandoned building in the Georgetown hospital complex he heard while eavesdropping in on a conversation between seniors.

At this point Nielson, simply refused to say anything or make direct eye contact in order to speed up the conclusion of the lunch.

At this point in the conversation McPherson was simply looking around for things to complain about.

Looking at the mural on the top floor of Leo’s he began: “get rid of the football team. I mean, really; we suck. What’s the point of even having the team? We bring these players to campus so that they can lose games three months out of the year, and then what do they do for the rest of the year? Cut the football budget, and while we’re at it, let’s cut sailing and crew and all these other bourgeois sports that no one cares about. Invest it all in basketball. Comparative advantage, man.”

Unable to endure the conversation any longer, Nielson made the excuse that he “felt the sudden onset of diarrhea” and hurriedly left the dining hall. McPherson shouted after him that he “looked forward to their next lunch” and could then be heard to begin telling the junior sitting at the next table how, “Dealing with this sexual assault on campus thing is a piece of cake.”