UHS good for Fresno Unified and Fresno State

NEARER THE BEGINNING of this semester, I accidentally talked to a student. The catch? She wasn’t from Fresno State.

I had asked her to comment on Hillary Clinton’s chances of election for an article I was poised to write.

She didn’t have any opinion on the matter, but that was expected.

Except maybe for that surly grad student — he looked like Steve Martin, but older and uglier — no students really had anything interesting to say.

I asked her what her class was, and she said she didn’t go here. She was a University High School student.

When I told her I was writing for the Collegian, she frowned a little.

“We don’t like The Collegian,” she said.

It’s so hard to tell UHS students apart from regular students these days.

I assumed she wasn’t lying, though. Saying you’re a UHS student around Fresno State students won’t exactly help you make first chair in the wind orchestra.

“Every time they write something about us, it’s negative,” she said. “I don’t have a place to graduate because of them.”

Why was I still listening? I walked off, in a manner that I hoped looked triumphant.

I think those kids should wear their sweatshirts more often, so I can more easily hate them arbitrarily.

You know, like what the Smittcamp Honors College did for those upstart full-riders?

I don’t know why they even wear those green-and-yellow sweaters.

It’s like voluntarily putting on your Star of David while vacationing in Munich, at least when the National Socialists were in power.

Point being, when our football team sucks we Fresno State students are only united in one thing: we hate the UHS kids, without reason or discretion.

We can’t even agree to hate USC — as we should — but we all know that the high school kids deserve our fullest loathement.

I even made up that word for the occasion.

According to the various and widespread negative hype, they’re brash, immature and noisy as they clog the lunch lines — personally, I think they fit right in.

What distinguishes these kids from us is that they’re pretty smart. They don’t deserve the education everywhere else around here.

Ever hear of Title I? I’m told there are a lot of other schools around here that are pretty Title-I-tastic. Most are south of Shaw.

Only the music department’s grudge stands.

You see, the wiser and more discerning Fresno State music majors believe that one of the practice rooms is haunted by a UHS student who died there.

For the most part though, those kids get the best education this side of Clovis Unified.

After all, who won the academic decathlon?

Edison High School, actually, and for the 11th straight time, but it also has more kids than Caruthers has people. UHS — with fewer than 400 students — earned second place.

Just by its association with Fresno State, UHS gives us a good name while giving the Fresno area a high school they won’t automatically be ashamed of.

That makes waiting in line a little longer a little easier to bear, doesn’t it?

If not, maybe you should just suck it up and eat a Nutri-Grain bar. Panda Express will just make you fatter, anyway.

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