In what is proving to be the biggest fad to hit college campuses since flagpole sitting and goldfish swallowing, students from Africa to Kansas are attempting to break the world pillow fight record.

The Guinness Book of World Records lists the record at 645 participants, set in June 2003 in Gannet, Kansas. Kansas it seems is the hotbed of pillow fight activity these days. At Towson University in Maryland, a recent attempt to break the record was attended by the vice president of students.

According the the Kansas State Collegian, fraternities Acacia and Clovia are sponsoring a “pillow war” they hope will break the Guinness record and bring the city and campus communities together. The flawed logic in using soft-core violence as a community-buiding campaign aside, Kansas has their bases covered when it comes to mass displays of pillow fighting.

Now is the time for students of Ohio State, a cornicopia of ideas and beliefs, to band together for one cause we can find common ground on: OSU could and should be the center of pillow fight activity – not just for the nation, but worldwide.

Much is made of differences on a college campus, but pillow fighting is a universal langauge. How wonderful would it be to see a sea of scarlet and gray pillow cases streaming in the wind as Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Libertarians all beat the living daylights out of each other. There are no politics in pillow fights; what better way to express the unity of OSU than by a cross-cultural, pan-organizational head thumping with overstuffed pillows.

Fact: OSU’s 58,000 students total more than the 3,210 residents of Ganett and the 21,000 students at Kansas State combined. We have the resources to be not only a top research institution academically, but the dominant force in the pillow fighting industry.

Greeks, student senators, professors, first-years – the whole of OSU: Now is the time to launch the largest pillow fight in the history of mankind. A grand campaign to rival any pillow fight ever witnessed. Even if students from OSU use the unofficial record of 2,400 reported once at Rochester University in New York, that number is only a fraction of our total undergraduate population. OSU can do it, and there is no better time than now.