Good old college days

Do you recall what it was like at your college when alumni day approached. The buildings and grounds guys really went to work, sprucing up the lawns (is that an oxymoron?), trimming the hedges, planting grass seed where the guys usually played frisbee and killed the lawn, touch-up painting the buildings here and there. Then, when the day finally came, the food service was unrecognizeable from that of the day before. There was real meat, not mystery meat, on the table. The veggies were fresh, not canned. The lettuce for the salad wasn't brown anymore.

It made you really know who was important to the school, and it clearly wasn't the students.

Well, I see some similarities in this story reported in this morning's NY Times:

TAYLOR, Tex., Feb. 9 — Responding to complaints about conditions at the nation’s main family detention center for illegal immigrants, officials threw open the gates on Friday for a first news media tour.

They portrayed the privately run converted prison, open since May, as a model facility “primarily focused on the safety of the children.”

Once all the barbed wire comes down, Gary Mead, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, said, “it’s going to look more like a community college with a very high chain-link fence.”

Among other things, critics have complained about the prisonlike conditions, the food and the limited amount of schooling and recreation provided for children.

Inside the fluorescent-lighted corridors, plastic plants had been hurriedly installed and some areas repainted, lawyers for some detainees said, and officials acknowledged that pizza was on the lunch menu for the first time. The detainees could not be interviewed.