By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
SEPT. 3, 2024 | We read this the other day from the Fitzgerald, Ga., newspaper, the Herald-Leader, coming from Editor Tim Anderson. We thought it was interesting. Here’s what Tim had to say about higher education in Alabama. Tim writes:
I think I got a little hint on why college tuition is so high. At the University of Alabama, the members of Delta Zeta sorority live in a 40,000 square foot house that cost an astounding $17 million.
Look up the Wall Street Journal article that tells the story. The interior has gold leaf trim, white oak paneling in the library and a blow dry bar (presumably for no-waiting hair fluffing).
As enrollment spiked in the 2010s, more elaborate Greek facilities were called for. The Delta Zeta house features eight massive stone columns across the front of the massive building, making the Parthenon look small.
The university got its first $10 million Greek house in 2012, and by 2016 almost all of the school’s sororities had spent that much — courtesy of loans from, guess who? The University of Alabama. I’m sure the school’s biggest boosters, whose little darlings populate the best sororities, encourage the practice. Nothing but the best for their princesses.
Something is slightly wrong with this picture to me. These are institutes of higher education —supposedly. If you take the cost of athletics facilities, coach salaries (Nick Saban’s net worth was $70 million) and sorority houses, I wonder what education opportunities could be offered to all students.
This is unlikely to be a situation unique to Alabama. After all, UGA’s Kirby Smart is the highest paid college football coach in history, knocking down $13 million per year.
Not bad work if you can get it.
More on language, this time from Susan McBrayer in Sugar Hill:
A few years ago, a British man came to my hometown of Shelby, N.C., to be an exchange teacher and was flabbergasted by all the Southernisms he heard while he was there.
He said he was initially puzzled by one peculiar saying often from his students.
At the end of his one-year exchange, he said that peculiar saying, and the one he couldn’t wait to tell the people back home in Yorkshire, was this one:
“Don’t make no never mind to me.”
More on language, this time form Tim Keith, also of Sugar Hill:
When I moved to Atlanta from Connecticut in 1975, I worked for a fellow who had been a football player at the University of Georgia. One day, while chatting in the office, this boss described an anxious coworker saying, “She’s as nervous as a streetwalker in church.”
Tim adds: “Might be that the only person more nervous would be a deacon who knew who she was and saw her in church!”
An article about church attendance a few weeks ago drew two comments.
George Wilson of Stone Mountain wrote: Another reason for lower church attendance is the partisan political involvement of church denominations in right-wing politics, starting with Jerry Falwell and the “moral majority.”
Maryland McCarthy of Snellville sent this in: “You touched my heart with this article. Our former church was hit hard by the pandemic. The older folks were still coming, but not the younger generation. The children’s Sunday School was a shadow of what it was. But now I’m in a new vibrant church with lots of babies, children and young adults. So much is happening to show God’s love in the community through Lawrenceville First United Methodist Church.”
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