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Burke is a third-year political science and English student.

By David Burke

It’s time to put an end to the North Campus vs. South Campus debate once and for all. The winner is ... no campus! That’s right, neither campus is superior in UCLA’s ongoing civil war. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that one out. Both campuses offer different attributes and have students who embody different qualities. Neither one is better than the other.

Trying to debate which side of campus is better is like trying to decide which dinner entree is better: soup or salad. There is no right answer. I enjoy laughing at people from the two campuses as much as the next guy, but I think that there are aspects of both sides that are hilarious and meritorious.

In response to Bonnie Chau’s recent column “Down South, mystery, genius abound” (Viewpoint, Jan. 25), I will defend North Campus against the attacks she makes in defending the South. One of Chau’s primary arguments against North Campus is that its students are huge “bullshitters.” That’s a very extreme argument. Generalizing that North Campus students are pretentious liars is like saying that all South Campus students are TI-86-using dorks whose idea of a wild night is downloading anime onto their computer and combing the dandruff out of their hair.

North Campus students are better at BS-ing because they are better at writing! I don’t like to BS, but I acknowledge it does take some skills many South Campus students do not generally possess. North Campus students are better liars, but they are also better readers and writers. If there is a more valuable skill than reading and writing, I would love to hear about it. South Campus students, whose favorite book is any book about “Star Wars,” please take note.

I think that North Campus students have an appreciation for some beautiful things in life that South Campus students are out of touch with – poetry, art, literature and nature, for example. Electrical engineering students can probably put together a telephone, but whether or not they can have a meaningful conversation on it is another question. There is some charm to the general social ineptness of South Campus students, but that doesn’t mean I want to attend a chemistry discussion party next Friday night.

Another benefit specific to North Campus is the overall physical attractiveness of its inhabitants. Say what you want about the importance of looks and about superficiality. The bottom line is that the average North Campus student is Brad Pitt or Catherine Zeta Jones to South Campus’s Matthew Perry or Joan Cusack.

Admittedly, North Campus has some flaws too. The pretense Chau complained about is real to some extent. Everyone who has taken a philosophy or political science class knows what I am talking about. There are a lot of North Campus students who act like they are above it all. They are above school, they are above the trivial pursuits of their classes, and they are above association with the average college student. There was a big group of them on my floor freshman year. They walk around wearing earthtones and Birkenstocks from Urban Outfitters while making a strenuous effort to appear like they aren’t consumed with the mind-numbingly lame customs of a “conformist” society.

These are the type of people who are 100 percent full of it.

They sit in class, stare off into the distance, and stroke their Van Dyke’s to look intelligent when in reality they are thinking about what happened on the last episode of “Temptation Island 2.” That’s just how some of the North Campus students are. South Campus doesn’t have as much pretense and image consciousness on its side of the campus. And yes, as Chau said, that can be very refreshing.

But the bottom line is North Campus is not any better than South Campus, or vice versa – they each have their flaws, and these balance out.

The average UCLA student is an intelligent individual who has a good group of friends and succeeds in school.

If you take the time to get to know a person on an individual basis you’ll see that even the most pretentious or most socially awkward students are pretty similar to those who you would define as normal.

My advice is that you should take classes on both sides of campus to get to know different areas of study and different types of people. It’s fun to debate, but any intelligent person will tell you that the winner of UCLA’s civil war is neither campus.