Every year I hear loyal Madisonians joke about “Hippie Christmas,” the annual late-summer event where disgusting conglomerations of soiled carpeting, liquor bottles, tattered clothes, smashed cabinetry, stained mattresses and malfunctioning neon beer signs litter the curbs of Downtown Madison by the truck loads. As a Madison resident and someone who works on campus, I have never seen this event as anything to laugh about, but instead as a serious embarrassment to the city and the UW-Madison campus as the poorest possible representation to the outside community by our students.
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