The Chinese have poisoned the world’s toy supply, Barack Obama is painting houses and David Beckham is making soccer relevant in the United States. And so before the rapture descends, it is with unyielding pleasure that I welcome the faithful back to this small patch of sanity and value-priced education.

True, you have been gone for a while, but O ye have returned unto the Promised Land. Shed is the seldom-wavering eye of responsibility, fully embraced is the glory of youth ‘ and not much has changed.

You will be comforted to see campus continues to weather its perpetual makeover gracefully, and the weather itself fluctuates almost as much as the fourth seat on The View.

And while we here in the lower Susquehanna Valley might not be having as excellent an adventure as Bill S. Preston Esq., Ted Logan or anyone who bought a Barbie doll last week, the pastoral idyll of Vestal Parkway is certainly a sight for world-weary eyes.

Life in Binghamton, as the future Class of 2011 will come to know well, is quite special. Owing much to a tableau of middle-America convenience and a no-nonsense aesthetic, Binghamton stands, truly, as the premier public institution in Broome County and one-third of Tioga.

But I don’t need to convince you to go into your grandmother’s crochet kitten purse and send Baxter the Bearcat a handful of nickels. You’ve already done that.

And what of this new batch of wide-eyed youth? They will learn, like countless before them, T-shirts and denim skirts prove less prudent on a night hitting the juice than convention suggests, and the elusive all-nighter has never been achieved without dire retribution.

Usually in the form of a non-edible liquid in the morning cereal.

As you wrap your eager minds around this unconscionable freedom society has reluctantly granted you and you try desperately to sate your appetites for maturity and liquor, keep in mind the sanctity that higher education is regarded with ‘ at least at Cornell ‘ and that no one in this part of the country has any trouble incarcerating a minor.

Take pride in your acceptance to Binghamton. We were, after all, a primary feature of a New York Times spread on the psychology of dormitory room door personalization this past July. Certainly not a laughable feat, especially when you consider dormitory doors of Kenyon, Ohio Wesleyan and Agnes Scott College in Atlanta were similarly demystified.

The state of the world might be questionable at best, but this year, at least for the matriculated, it is something to put stock in.