Snookered

Some parents of Rutgers University students are a little peeved to find out that the university to which their pride, joy and large checks go paid one Nicole Polizzi more for one night's work from behind a podium than they pay for nine months of work by their children.

Ms. Polizzi, better known as "Snooki," is one of the cast members of the unscripted MTV show Jersey Shore -- an infliction for which show creators may find themselves in a special, newly-created level of Original Guido Dante's Inferno. Rutgers recently paid the 23-year-old $32,000 to speak to Rutgers students. This is a third more than the average year at Rutgers costs. It's $2,000 more than Rutgers will be paying author Toni Morrison to speak at its 2011 undergraduate commencement (To be fair, while Ms. Morrison holds both a Nobel and a Pulitzer prize, Ms. Polizzi is often more intelligible).

The money Rutgers paid Ms. Polizzi came from what are called "student fees" or "student activity fees." That's the name the college gives to the money it will take from you because as long as they slap it on a bill you'll pay it, even if you don't really know what it's for. Again, to be fair, there's a good chance the college doesn't know what it's for either. Some student activity money is spoken for. It helps to subsidize athletic spending at quite a few colleges, or to pay off construction of under-used stadiums or arenas. It may be directed to specific speaker series or other campus activities.

And some of it gets thrown into a fund that a school's student senate will spend on activities of different sorts during the year, subject to the school's guidelines and whatever voting procedures that student senate applies to itself. So basically, the school takes a sizable chunk of "student activity fee" money, sticks it in a bank account and tells a group of 20-year-olds to figure out how to blow it before May. This is how you end up paying more than a year's tuituion at a supposedly prestigious four-year university to someone the age of some of your students who has yet to finish her veterinary technologist program at her local community college.

See, college students are sometimes prone to acting on a whim. Awaiting full development of their forebrains, they will do things without considering the consequences because those things seemed like good ideas at the time and because that very same not-yet-finished forebrain development was unable to deter them from doing so. Having already made the poor decision to watch The Jersey Shore and pay attention to its cast of anti-examples, they will now make the poor decision to bring one of those cast people to their campus and spend real money to do so.

University administrators, who might be counted on to say things like, "You want how much so you can listen to who?" rarely intervene in these matters. They realize requiring student senates to make sensible decisions about student activity money would hamper their ability to use the activity fee as a tool to maintain the illusion student decisions matter in the slightest. They may not even monitor the use of activity fee money all that closely, leaving themselves unable to roll back spending they would not have approved of or that was technically illegal according to university guidelines.

The college where I used to work held an annual springtime event that was designed to be some fun outdoors and provide several pictures for recruitment brochures and admissions marketing. Even though the college claimed the name (and took the money) of the denomination to which I belong, that claim never played a role in deciding what kind of entertainment was brought to campus. One year we featured Tone-Loc, best known for the late '80s version of "Wild Thing" as well as his ode to aphrodisiacs, "Funky Cold Medina." The headlining band's lead singer displayed an impressive vocabulary -- he was able to work both the four-letter word for sexual activity, its adjectival form and its combined form as favored by Samuel L. Jackson into most of his sentences.

Another year, the headlining band displayed some wonderfully-realized misogyny in the free-range vocabulary of its lyrics. When this fact was brought to the attention of a vice-president who handled this part of student life, he did not know that the band had this kind of song in its repertoire. He hadn't checked, he said, he had just "trusted the students."

I've worked with campus ministry in one form or another in almost all of the years I've been in ministry. I love college students. More than 90 percent of the ones I met were bright, sincere and good-hearted young people who hungered to find out about their reasons for being here and for ways to make things better. College students made putting up with the administrative garbage and two-faced nature of the church-related college at which I worked bearable. I wouldn't trade a day of the chance I've had to work with them for a winning lottery ticket (I might split a Powerball entry, though. Hey, I'm paying off loans too). But I wouldn't trust them with hundreds of thousands of dollars of someone else's money to be used at their discretion any more than I would trust them to turn down pizza.

Actually, I have to wonder why these Rutgers parents are surprised. Giving Ms. Polizzi $32,000 for her time is exactly the kind of decision I'd expect in this situation. After all, every day we can see federal and state legislatures make bizarre decisions about how to spend other people's money, and those persons are nominally grown-ups. Take away that nominal adulthood and even the implication of making considered decisions, and you end up having enshrined for all time that your bastion of higher education, your center of great learning, your ivory tower of rare and deep thought...wrote a new-car-sized check to someone best known as "Snooki."