Donatella Versace wears 'Stuff by Hillary Duff"

Okay, so President Richard Brodhead will officially be inaugurated as the ninth president of Duke University this Saturday. You probably will hear quite enough about it in the coming week. However, bear with me for the next couple of lines and fast-forward a bit to the inauguration.

Let’s be cliché and hypothetical: What if you could choose who the next president of Duke would be? What if you could pick the next president based upon how you envision Duke? Personally speaking, I wish Duke were more cosmopolitan, more left-leaning, weren’t so homogeneous and had a much more diverse social spectrum. So I decided to play a little game. What if I chose the next president of Duke to re-create the University how I envisioned it?

Saturday, September 18, 2004 | Christian Dior-HAM, N.C. — Donatella Versace is inaugurated as Duke University’s ninth president.

President Donatella’s day begins briskly at the crack of 4:00 p.m., as she rolls over from her luxurious Dior sheets only to, of course, find five naked men still passed out from the administrative meeting that went into the late hours of the night: Hard at work, as always. Once the vomit in her mouth is cleansed away with a breakfast of ‘caine, served on a golden platter by her scantily-clad man-servants, she begins her first full day as president.

She revitalizes the now new Bryan Center cat-walkway, equipped with strobe-lights and a train of models that walk up and down on an hourly basis. Angered by the neo-gothic architecture, she demands that all of Main West and East be torn down and rebuilt as massive disco-raves to hold her new fall fashion line parties. Unfortunately, residents don’t exactly get the memo and are forced to quickly flee as Donatella personally bulldozes their now-leveled dorm rooms. No more campus.

As for basketball, don’t worry. President Donatella is very pro-sport. Love the Blue Devil Mascot? He’ll still be there, except he’s been ever so slightly altered into six circuit boys, wearing only blue Speedos with an attached devil tail on the back, dancing in synchronous formation to the blasting Paul Oakenfold remix of our fight song. Unfortunately, Donatella’s demand that foam come down from the ceiling every time we scoreddoesn’t exactly play out so well, as all of our players slip and brake their ankles. As a result, we have to forfeit the season. No more basketball.

Donatella decides that buses are simply not enough. So she unveils the DukeMetro, a proposed campus-wide subway. Each train is draped in Versace and equipped with hi-definition plasma screens that play the latest fashion shows live from Milan. DukeMetro doesn’t really go anywhere or do anything, but damnit if she couldn’t make it completely out of Versace then who really cares? Unfortunately, she burns all of the buses in her midday drunken rage as she grabs as much gasoline and rips as much J-Crew as she could off of innocent student bystanders to create one massive fashion-bus inferno, which leaves many a naked student stranded without a way to get to class. No more classes. No more academics.

No more campus. No more basketball. No more academics. No more Duke. I’ve finally come to accept that not only can I not have Duke exactly the way I want it, but I shouldn’t have Duke exactly the way I want it. In fact no one should. And as some will become scathingly critical of Brodhead within his first few days post-inauguration remember he is attempting to satisfy what all of us envision Duke should be, but it can’t be exactly what we may want.