In Which I’ve Had Enough Time in the _Charles in Charge_ Vortex

At one point over the weekend I got thinking about that episode of Charles in Charge where Charles run to be in charge of the Rutgers student government, and was figuring to snark at myself about how they didn’t even bother to learn how the student government at Rutgers was organized. I went to Rutgers, understand, a little later than Charles did, but I can tell you there were no important constitutional changes in Rutgers student government between our tenures. Just the one time where the governing association lost a page of their constitution, the one where it said the College of Engineering students got a representative, so they had to stop doing it, and the College of Engineering students stopped talking to them.

Anyway I checked on Wikipedia and learned that while the show is set in New Jersey and Charles was attending college there it wasn’t Rutgers, but rather the fictional “Copeland College” and obviously if you’re making up your college you can give it any student government structure you like, including “effective”. (Haven’t lost my undergraduate-student-newspaper gear after all, how about that?) Also that the show only ran for one year on network TV, when I would have bet it ran for fourteen years in the mid-80s. When it returned for syndication they kept Charles around but swapped out the family he was in charge of for another one, something Charles learned about by coming home from summer vacation and finding a whole different family there. That’s much more of bizarre waking-nightmare experience than I expect from Charles in Charge.