It has often been said that history repeats itself, and the old axiom is certainly true at… It has often been said that history repeats itself, and the old axiom is certainly true at Pitt – often, instead of changing, history just travels in thinly-spaced circles. So a thoughtful Pitt student may predict with some confidence the events of the upcoming semester. Things will play out as follows:

When you return from break, many beloved Pitt faculty members will have been fired with little or no just cause. The athletics department, frustrated by poor attendance at basketball games during the break and confused as to how this could’ve happened despite its carefully executed lottery system, will be selling extra tickets by the thousands. Pitt will have played tremendously in the Insight Bowl. Steve Pederson will be on his way back to Nebraska, and the old Pitt script will be on its way back onto T-shirts and bumper stickers.

The Pitt skyline will have adopted several new buildings, including half a dozen biomedical towers, three of which will be equipped with lasers. Racial profiling would have been vanquished by then, except that it never existed to begin with. Carnegie Mellon University will have been bought and converted into a Pitt branch campus, UPMCCMU. The price of pizza will rise – along with the price of tuition – only to be met by brief protest and prompt acceptance.

Student Government Board members will be cited for alcohol-related offenses, but will be less quick to cite significant progress. Sodexho will raise wages by one cent, continuing in its unwavering efforts to battle poverty one penny at a time.

In a brilliant legal move, Pitt’s lawyers will narrowly avoid a lawsuit by making all gay faculty members straight. The powers that be will discover yet another way to spell Petersen. The beer and cheese that sat in your refrigerator for three weeks over break will no longer be good, but they will still be good enough.

Though things will continue to change in the coming semester and will continue to change back to whatever they were before then, some things are constant. This semester, and next semester, and next year, and in years to come, Penn State will continue to suck, and Pitt students will continue to remind them.