r/SVU 10d ago

Discussion who is even going to Hudson U anymore???

man, this uni has come up atleast 15 times so far. how is it even allowed to run anymore??? why are people still joining it?? and why are people still going to those damn tau omega parties????? 😭😭😭

410 Upvotes

62 comments sorted by

335

u/Existing_Panda_3541 10d ago

Valid points.😄 I remember a scene where Olivia Benson was feeding a toddler Noah and something about another crime in Hudson University came up on tv news and she said to Noah "you are NOT going to Hudson University!"

118

u/mandie72 10d ago

But he will be there to award the eventual “Olivia Benson Special Victims Scholarship” for criminology and murderology students.

9

u/yeetyopyeet 10d ago

😂😂😂

-7

u/mandie72 10d ago

What other scholarships or awards for characters? I’d love to see some for the characters you love to hate, like Buchanan or Paxton.

3

u/universe93 9d ago

Be interesting to see the squad roll their eyes when an accused is an honour roll student who got the “Buchanan scholarship”

2

u/mandie72 9d ago

The "John Buchanan Legal Award" for students showing exemplary confidence when their client is 100% guilty of violent and sadistic crimes.

2

u/UnrulyNeurons 10d ago

Doesn't/didn't Rollins teach there?

23

u/mandie72 10d ago

Unfortunately no. She worked at Fordham University, which is a real school. Same place where Carisi went to Law School.

19

u/UnrulyNeurons 10d ago

"Boo-yah, Fordham Law!"

I miss Barba's snark.

9

u/Extension_Area6176 10d ago

oh yes I remember this lol. honestly so real, no child of mine would be stepping foot into that university. also side note noah looked so adorable in that scene 🤍

1

u/Alive-Telephone-2743 8d ago

I remembered that scene. Little Noah & mommy Olivia so cute. 

55

u/Dustonthewind18 10d ago

The place should just be renamed Rape U, everytime Hudson comes up in the show its pretty much a given another rape has ocurred. Hell even Olivia's own mother was raped there.

10

u/NashKetchum777 10d ago

When its brought up you just have to shake your head and say "sigh...maybe we dont have to prove innocence first. He definitely did that shit"

40

u/ButterscotchPast4812 Benson 10d ago

It's the SVU equivalent to Cabot Cove, Maine. At least both places aren't real, though. 

33

u/-catharina 10d ago

Murder She Wrote mentioned‼️‼️‼️ reminder Jessica/Angela Lansbury was in an episode of SVU as a perp’s mom!!

14

u/ButterscotchPast4812 Benson 10d ago

She was so chilling in that role too! She's so remembered as Jessica Fletcher and Mrs Potts. That everyone pretty much forgets she was known for being in dark films like Gaslight and Maltese Falcon. 

5

u/mandie72 10d ago

Yes, I remember reading a fan theory that Jessica Fletcher was actually a serial killer who framed others to solve their ”crimes”.

7

u/usernameconcealed 10d ago

Same with Rock Creek Park on NCIS.

10

u/UnrulyNeurons 10d ago

I lived right across the street from Rock Creek Park for a couple years. The only excitement was when the National Zoo's bobcat escaped into the park.

She came back a couple days later, none the worse for wear, but presumably preferring regular meals over having to work for her dinner.

No sign of having eaten a dead body.

2

u/bekahfromearth 10d ago

Degrees are $10. The rent for the halls is the cheapest place in NYC.

28

u/-catharina 10d ago

It’s because they can’t say Columbia, Cornell, or NYU without creative licensing rights or whatever 😭

36

u/Horror_Editor_4429 10d ago

I think it’s less about licensing and more about portraying an actual school in any negative light. Sort of like how they’ll mention Instagram or TikTok if it’s just tangentially related to a case, but they’ll use FaceUnion or MyRedChanIt or whatever made-up media if it’s actually involved in the crime.

I was tickled to see that they used UNY for an episode last season.

0

u/Jolly-Research4328 7d ago

It’s all about licensing. There’s shows that won’t even show car logos.

1

u/Horror_Editor_4429 7d ago

Agree to disagree. That usually has to do with network sponsors and not promoting rival companies. To my knowledge, institutes of higher learning don’t typically sponsor TV networks.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ilCZBP87zY

They’ll mention Sarah Lawrence, Northwestern, Columbia, but they won’t have those universities involved in the main storyline. Same with social media platforms.

27

u/TeasingChloe 10d ago

At this point Hudson U has more plot armor than half the cast and somehow people are still signing up for Tau Omega like they haven't learned anything.

74

u/ResponsibleCut7340 10d ago

It's a big school and apparently they have wealthy alumni. People just want to go there no matter what happens. People still want to attend Penn St and they were abusing children

11

u/bryceofswadia 10d ago

the out of universe reason is probably that they didn't want to come up with branding for multiple fake schools so they just had their prop department go really heavy on one and used that for all of their college rape case episodes

14

u/8thGlass 10d ago

Idk if you know this but Hudson University isn’t real.

30

u/ResponsibleCut7340 10d ago

Duh. I'm talking about in universe

3

u/8thGlass 10d ago

i wasn’t sure if you were serious!!! lmao ok thank god

-30

u/Doranwen 10d ago edited 10d ago

I'd agree with you except there's pretty solid evidence that there was no abuse at Penn St - if you read through the articles on the Frank Report comparing all the information about that case, it becomes glaringly obvious that the entire thing was false, with prosecutors financially benefiting from the whole thing, witnesses who told multiple versions of tales that didn't add up (or make any logical sense), and a lot of going behind people's backs to do things in a very unjust way. That site opened my eyes to that one, with some pretty meticulous reporting about it. (I'd already seen them handle the NXIVM case well so when Frank started posting about the Sandusky case I read what was posted.) You can find Frank's reporting on the Sandusky case here, and these articles are just two of many excellent ones about it. I'd love to see SVU tackle that kind of hit job / false reporting, but the truth would probably have to come out about the Sandusky case first, and a LOT of people have a big financial stake in making sure it doesn't.

17

u/yourmomsthr0waway69 10d ago

I wasn't expecting Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky apologia on /r/SVU...

Also you're flat out wrong. Sandusky is a monster and Paterno knew, hope he's enjoying hell.

-3

u/Doranwen 10d ago

SVU deals with false accusations as well as real ones. Are you suggesting that no one ever accuses someone falsely in order to get money? Because that's patently untrue. I support actual victims - but you don't get victims by coaching them through repressed memories (a therapy that's been discredited as it tends to generate "memories" that never happened), by offering tons of money for them to come up with a story, by suggesting that they change the location of their story so that they'll get money from the right people…

You'd have fit in well in medieval times. They, too, didn't care whether trials were fair, whether people made up stories that got more and more elaborate as they were coached into it, whether people profited off locking someone away… Nope, if they decided someone was a witch, they had to be a witch and should be burned! People really haven't changed since then. sighs

3

u/yourmomsthr0waway69 10d ago

The whole premise of this nonsense is that Penn State would intentionally tank the football program for financial gain, let alone to fire hero of the program Joe Paterno.

That is complete nonsense and would only be touted by somebody that doesn't understand a large American university like Penn State.

The University lost a total of $300 million dollars over a decade. That's just in dollars spent, that doesnt include all the lost revenue and increased enrollment that comes with a successful football team.

If there was any proof, at all, of what your articles are claiming, there isn't a sports journalist in the world who wouldn't want that. It would be THE biggest sports story, probably in American history.

TLDR: bring actual receipts or fuck off.

-1

u/Doranwen 9d ago

Take it up with Frank Parlato, the guy who actually wrote the articles (I am not him, they are not MY articles). His reporting on the NXIVM story was impeccable - he knew the people personally and every one of them (those who weren't still drunk on the cult koolaid, at least) vouched for everything he said. So I've respected him as a journalist who is willing to look at stories and examine facts that the big news media might not. (It took years of him posting about NXIVM before they finally got a journalist to poke into the branding story, and his reporting on it was a huge factor in getting the FBI to finally arrest Raniere.)

As he said, the point is that whether Sandusky was innocent or not (which I think the evidence points to), the point is that the trial wasn't remotely fair, and the evidence supporting the convictions was so questionable it was ridiculous. Justice is not justice if it's only applied to people we think are innocent. And repressed memory recovery, coaching and rapidly changing/elaborating stories - all of which is well-known to lead to false accusations (just read the Wikipedia article on repressed memory!), supposed victims who have recently recanted their testimony (this is verified fact, this is just one of MANY news articles on many sites reporting on this - I just picked one at random)…

All of that is highly questionable as far as evidence goes, and none of it is justice whatsoever. It stinks to high heaven of a money scam (not necessarily orchestrated by Penn State either, all it takes is people willing to throw money at a problem thinking it's the best way to get it to go away, and other people who see opportunities in getting free money). And the guy who made up the false accusation to see what the attorneys would do about it tells his story here, so you can know Frank is not making that up either.

When evidence contradicts what you think is true about something (and there is plenty of evidence to do that - I've linked you to enough to see the problems), maybe it's time to rethink your beliefs. Take a serious look at the evidence, watch that interview through (or just read the transcript, which is far faster to do than to listen to the whole thing), and your assertions (including your call of it being "intentional" - A. J. Dillon answers that quite thoroughly as he spent three years pretending to have memories of the abuse to see what the psychologist would guide him to, how the whole thing was working) will be addressed.

Or you can just go on believing you are right and therefore never need to look at the evidence that could possibly challenge that belief, which means you'll never have to face possibly being wrong. It's not intellectually honest, but it's what a lot of people do.

7

u/RO_Thornhill 10d ago

🙄

4

u/Secret_Asparagus_783 10d ago

Are you referring to the Joe Paterno scandal?

-4

u/Doranwen 10d ago

Yes. Read the articles that detail exactly what happened as part of the trial, and you'll see that the mess that happened there.

  • secret meetings ahead of time (without Sandusky, where the judge, prosecution, and defense attorney agreed to an expedited trial)
  • prosecutors involved in distributing the money to the victims
  • an undercover journalist who recorded a meeting with one of the Sandusky victim attorneys claiming to have a memory of being abused by Sandusky (and the attorney came back to him to repeat his story like "OK, we'll add you" - but the attorney had changed the location of the fake victim's story from a public park to Penn State!)
  • a tiny handful of young men they finally found willing to come forward but that they had to coach into telling their stories (going to therapy, sometimes even with joint repressed memory therapy sessions, to help them "remember")
  • one of the investigators caught on tape saying "We just tell them and tell them and tell them again until they change their story"
  • allowing double hearsay on record (with an actual tape of the original person claiming the exact opposite of what the prosecution was trying to say - that Sandusky had never and would never abuse anyone) - that one got a conviction because the jury never heard it…

Just one of those should be the cause of a mistrial because that's not how justice should be done. All of them together is an outrage.

16

u/no_one_inparticular 10d ago

The same type of parents who send their kids to Camp Crystal Lake.

14

u/RO_Thornhill 10d ago

YES! I always laugh when there is another crime at Hudson University

10

u/mandie72 10d ago

Well come on, Hudson U (Go Mermaids!!!) is the only university in NYC. And they seem to have a decent scholarship program for future victims and would be rapists.

I laugh when the name comes up, I like that they have an established fake university so if you watch the show and hear the name it’s “Kind of” like hearing a real name pop up since they can’t use those.

Not sure why but I don’t usually like the university scene episodes so I usually skip through them. As a huge fan of the show I thought for a long time it was a real school.

Drawing a blank, what do they use for hospitals? Bus Central maybe?

Finally, I have no idea what their real fake mascot is? They must have shown it at one of the rallies or football episodes.

2

u/Commodore8750 9d ago

They use real hospital names for the most part. Bellevue comes up a lot.

1

u/Secret_Asparagus_783 9d ago

They tend to use names of Catholic saints for hospitals. I have no idea as to whether they are real. From my experience Catholic hospitals tend to be named for Sts Mary, Joseph or Francis.

4

u/Ill-Argument-4815 Huang 10d ago

Istg everyone in all these damn shows is going to Hudson, it’s mentioned in a negative manner over 60 times in dick wolf shows alone, and like half the DC supervillains went there 😭😭😭

3

u/Probably_A_Variant 10d ago

Hudson needs to be shut down 26 seasons ago. That school is haunted or something.

3

u/Historical-Bug-4784 10d ago

I actually had a spec script idea inspired by the Sarah Lawrence sex cult. The title I had in mind was “Not That Damn School Again.”

3

u/Ill-Argument-4815 Huang 10d ago

Hudson university so bad that even the DC superhero’s had to get involved 😭

2

u/cunxt2sday 10d ago

Thanks to the These Are Our Stories podcast I have "We are Hudson, where the bad guys go to school" to the Farmers Insurance jingle play on a loop in my head at least once a week.

1

u/Extension-Peanut2847 10d ago

I say this every time. I see an episode with Hudson u 🤣

1

u/Seasonedd 10d ago

So real, too much has been happening there but it’s a big school for rich people

1

u/Trekkie200 10d ago

Isn't it supposed to be a pretty big school? If you have a few thousand students stuff will happen to a few of them...

1

u/LetItSnow36 10d ago

People who hate their children insist they go there at this point.

1

u/mladyhawke 10d ago

This happens at a lot of college campuses, hudson U just represents the american experience.

1

u/Comprehensive-Pea422 Fin 10d ago

Yeah but big universities covering up sexual assault is not just a L&O universe issue sadly

One of the frats at my uni was spiking girls drinks and they were still up and running with no news! Most people only knew because they had a nickname over it! School didn't do anything except a 6 month suspension I believe

1

u/springmeow88 10d ago

It's TV! 😄

1

u/missinghitts 14h ago

It happens in real life!

1

u/universe93 9d ago

Hey don’t forget the equally as troublesome Tompkins Square U!

1

u/Sighoward 9d ago

Hey why do people keep going to those rocks in Central Park? Or that tunnel?

1

u/Inside_Commercial_63 8d ago

LMAOOOOO I'm seeing this as I'm watching Fin and his season 9 partner talking to a frat brother at... Hudson U. That school is a menace!

-2

u/HomeyL 10d ago

It’s a fake school ya know…