My favorite holiday of the entire year is fast approaching. Sure, Easter promotes a spirit of salvation and Halloween has all the charms and graces of a Wednesday night at your local strip club, but for me Thanksgiving is where it is at.

Thanksgiving unites us rather than divides us. Thanksgiving tells us that we can all come together and recognize our blessings. Everyone can celebrate on this glorious holiday, no matter your religious or moral beliefs. Unless you don’t believe in turkey and mashed potatoes and stuffing, in which case you’re probably not a very happy person anyway.

So, in honor of this most auspicious of holidays, I wanted to take time out of my regularly scheduled complaining to give thanks for all the things I love about GW.

First, thank you for the tuition. It’s really useful to have such a large number to compare other large numbers to. Whenever Congress is debating a spending bill, I can just whip out a pocket calculator and say, “Wow, this bill would only cost the taxpayers 14 years of classes at GW! What a bargain!” My parents will often weep when I do this. I think they are proud of my mathematics skills.

Next, thank you for your transparently superficial commitment to community service. Last year, when we were trying to convince Michelle Obama to speak at Commencement, we got e-mails every week about ways to serve. Now that she’s gone, you’ve gone back to letting the Office of Community Service bungle its way through the motions. You’re also doing a great job continuing to force all the Alternative Breaks kids to raise their own money. Thank you for crushing their spirits before they’ve got any ideas, because who really cares about community service anyway?

Third, I want to thank you for never being able to figure out what kind of school you want to be. When I came to GW, I knew I wanted to go to a school with a strong emphasis on government policy and political science. Little did I know that just three years later, we would try to be a scientific research powerhouse! This was very surprising to me. But everyone likes surprises, especially ones that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Thank you for being so damn unpredictable. We’re all looking forward to your super-cool new science building!

Finally, thank you so much for all the wonderful doubletalk you’ve taught me over the past three years. I’ve really enjoyed reading about all your successes in fundraising while I’ve been here; why, just this year you announced that you’d raised a record amount of money, the most in the University’s history. And then, to cap it all off, you completely and utterly failed to do anything about Gelman Library, and you blamed it on a “lack of fundraising.” You sly dogs. Thanks for teaching me how to brag about my successes while shirking responsibility for my failures.

GW’s administration has taught me more than I could ever learn in my classes here at GW. Sure, my classes can teach me “facts” about the real world and what sort of things I “need to know” to “get a job,” but my professors could never teach me that you don’t need to know what you’re doing to run a large profitable organization. And isn’t that the most important lesson of all?

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Logan Dobson, a senior majoring in political science, is a Hatchet columnist.

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