“Periodically”? Come on now, Bucket. That’s a bit of an understatement.

Charles B., don’t mind little Jethro too much. That guy is delusional. I’m not the first person he’s accused of being you or someone else, and I can bet I won’t be the last. He’s a bit paranoid (if you know what I mean).

I realize that USC has been around longer, which makes it all the more perplexing that UCLA had a meteoric rise from its inception, surpassing USC within a relatively short frame of time and eventually being mentioned in the same breath with other the top universities in the world. I write this from firsthand experience, as I hold degrees from UCLA and another top-ranked university (an Ivy which shall go unnamed), the latter at which I met ONE trojan during my tenure as a student, while meeting countless UCLA grads (not to mention several graduates from several other UC schools). Fact. You seem like a sharp, resourceful guy (after all, you graduated from UCLA grad school) and I’m sure you can tell that I was simply personifying the school by using the metaphor of a little brother. I used to think that the student populations were similar. However, recent business trips to USC that involved communication with students, staff, and administration reminded me of an old plaque on the UCLA campus (Bunche Hall) that shows gratitude to the university for allowing Jewish students when other universities in the area (i.e. SC) categorically denied them admission. Also, via my personal experience and from what I’ve read on USC blogs, UCLA fans don’t as easily tolerate so much racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and hate-laden vitriol as do TrollJans. (If you are a person of color affiliated with USC, how do mitigate and sort that?) I dislike hateful vitriol just as much as the next reasonable person, but USC commenters take the cake–and on several blogs. When I was an undergrad at UCLA, it was the most diverse campus in the country, but, alas, you’re right that the richness and difference of intellectual opinion derived from diversity has been hampered to some degree. At any rate, it’s funny when SC alums said it was the end of UCLA with all the CA budget cuts–UCLA recently raised more money than ever, breaking national records in the process (it’s in our DNA). Sample was a shrewd man. He figured out how to swing more money SC’s way and how to raise the UN&WR rankings. That, however, has limited cachet when you consider everything in the aggregate. I’ve met several SC fans that have admitted that they are “sickened” and “embarrassed” by the arrogance and ignorance of fellow USC fans. You’d be hard-pressed to find UCLA fans that will truthfully say the same…it’s just a different and more respectful culture overall. Until I witness meaningful changes that change my perception of usc as a university largely stuck on reactionary, materialistic, good ol’ boy politics (not everybody, to be sure, but far too many alums and affiliates), then I have to be real and say that USC is still our little sibling.

Like most other people I know who attended USC’s film school, my feelings about the place are complicated, so there is a limit to how much effort I will put into defending USC. Nonetheless, I just find it bizarre to see UCLA folks talking about UCLA like it’s the Yale of the western U.S. In my profession, I have found that UCLA definitely takes a backseat to Stanford and Berkeley (fair or not).

I was a film major at USC, so I don’t really know what it would be like to attend USC and major in something normal, like History. All I know is that most of the people I met at USC were pretty much like the students I met at UCLA (and, for that matter, the Cal grads I met at UCLA’s law school, where they were the largest contingent) — mostly bright, mostly from California’s suburbs. (To be fair, since I moved to California in 1994, I also have never been able to discern the supposedly significant differences between Northern Californians and Southern Californians, and many people think I’m wrong about that — especially the Northern Californians, who seem very invested in the notion).

The stereotypes about USC have been around a long time. In Upton Sinclair’s 1920′s novel Oil!, the young protagonist attends a barely-disguised USC, and the image was already formed — a school full of privileged kids obsessed with a crooked football team, etc. (Then again, if I recall correctly, the protagonist meets his Jewish socialist future wife at that school, so even then, there were exceptions enrolled). That image will take a long time to die out, especially since some element of that old culture still survives. But that element survives in almost all large universities, and probably always will, so long as there are fraternities. Regardless, UCLA fans often seem unaware that most of USC has nothing to do with any of that, these days. I doubt that my wife’s uncle, who has been a USC professor for decades, spends much time posting anti-Semitic comments on message boards, given that he is Jewish himself.

Re: fans’ comments on blogs, maybe you weren’t reading this blog when a guy calling himself “BruinRob” spent what felt like two years posting daily comments in which he would use letters and punctuation marks to draw vulgar images and then invite us to “Taste it!” In fairness to UCLA, BruinRob admitted that he hadn’t gone to school there, but I’ve seen far nastier things on the Daily News UCLA blog from persons who probably did go to UCLA. I don’t know if he’s still around, but there used to a be a Christian fundamentalist who would hijack comment threads and turn them into a bunch of ugly Muslim-bashing. And then you have the nasty comments from some of the Bruin trolls on this blog, paradoxically posting homophobic comments while claiming that they are only taunting the homophobes (although again, to be fair, I figure only about half the people who post on these blogs went to any college at all, let alone USC or UCLA).

Anyway, I haven’t found UCLA fans to be morally superior, as a group, in any respect. My sister-in-law was at the most recent USC-UCLA game with her Bruin-fan husband, and she said that the people around them roared like savages when Barkley was taken out by that hit from behind. Whatever the relative merits of these schools as academic institutions, football fandom is about a bunch of tribal nonsense, which then gets taken to nasty extremes on these anonymous message boards. I don’t really know why the Daily News has allowed this place to become such a sewer, but over time I have come to admire the free-wheeling, anything-goes atmosphere in this clown show.