"Noble"?

Oh, what a search for Evanston news will yield. San Diego columnist Don Freeman calls Northwestern "a noble center of academic pursuits in suburban Evanston, Ill., north of Chicago, where winter strikes with stinging ferocity." What in hell or on Earth possesses a man to write like that is beyond me. It does work with the column as a whole, which reads like a poetic recording of a senile nightmare. I'm assuming he wrote it as the heavy sedatives wore off before dinnertime. Tell me, Don, was it Pizza Night at the sanitarium?