Month: December 2018

Professors tend to be vigorously self-righteous when it comes to honesty.  Witness the moral indignation they display when encountering instances of student plagiarism.  Thus, it’s a bit embarrassing to have faculty members blithely offering an egregious falsehood whenever they post an “Out of Office” message on their e-mail.  The message typically says something like:

“I will be away until [date] with limited access to e-mail.”

“Limited access to e-mail”?  Oh really?  You’re saying this in 2018, when virtually anyone with a standard-issue smartphone can launch a missile from an atoll in the Pacific while sitting in a Waffle House in Tougaloo, Mississippi having grits and home fries?  Exactly how dumb do you think people are?  Probably the only place on the planet where you would have limited access to e-mail is if you were residing inside the chest cavity of a polar bear while doing research in the Arctic Circle.

Of course, you know what your message actually means.  It means that you don’t want to answer emails for a while.  That’s a legitimate desire.  What’s not legitimate is lying about it.  Thus, in the name of transparency I am providing a template for professors to use when composing their out-of-office messages.  Feel free to adapt it to your needs.

“I will be away until _______.  Please note the following:

—  If you’re somebody I enjoy hearing from, I’ll respond within 24 hours.

—  If you’re not sure the above category applies to you, assume that it doesn’t.

—  If you’re writing to ask me to serve on a faculty committee to revise the core curriculum, I will get back to you within 36 weeks.

— If you’re writing to ask me to chair a faculty committee to revise the core curriculum, I will delete your message and claim that I never received it.

—  If you are from the Business Office, requesting additional documentation of my expenses for the conference on “Marsupials in 19th-Century French Literature” that I attended in Haiti last month, bite me.  I already submitted my receipts.  If you people lost them, that’s on you.  In any event, you owe me $1,838.57.

—  If you’re my department chair, and you’d like me to teach a course that starts in 10 days because the adjunct you hired for it just failed her drug test, fuggedaboudit.

—  If you’re a student seeking a recommendation letter for graduate school, try to recall if I ever explicitly said that you should go to graduate school.  If you can’t, don’t expect a reply.

—  If you’re a student writing for any other reason, assume that I have never suggested that you go to graduate school.  Do not expect a reply, even if your e-mail has nothing to do with graduate school.

— If you’re the colleague who bad-mouthed me to the Dean three weeks ago, and who now needs my assistance with something, the answer is NO. 

—  If you have ever used the phrase “lived experience” in a sentence, you can expect a reply within 24 hours, but it will take the form of a reprimand.

OK, I’ve tried to help.  As you prepare your out-of-office messages for the upcoming holiday season, please take this opportunity to do the right thing.

Tell the truth.

 

 

 

It’s hard not to feel sorry for the folks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as they try to figure out what to do with Silent Sam, the bronze statue honoring a Confederate soldier that occupied a prominent spot on campus until August of this year, when protests resulted in the toppled monument being moved to an undisclosed location (no joke).

Watching UNC officials wrestle with this issue has been painfully hilarious.  Ever go to the circus and see a Volkswagen Beetle arrive at the center ring, disgorging an endless stream of clowns who proceed to run around maniacally, kicking up a sawdust storm of chaos in their oversized shoes?  OK, you’ve got the picture.

University Life has learned that a solution may be at hand.  Through back channels, the President of the United States has contacted UNC and offered to place Silent Sam near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.  According to a confidential source within the Administration who uses the code name J-Kush, the President’s logic is straightforward:  “Both monuments honor soldiers.  Nobody knows who Silent Sam really was, except that his name was Sam and he didn’t talk much.  Pretty much the same story for the unnamed guys in the Tomb.”

J-Kush maintains that “there is no way we’d let protesters get near any of the monuments at Arlington, so we’ve got that covered.  Of course, the President realizes that using a U.S. soldier to guard Sam might draw criticism, given the whole Confederate thing, so the site would be patrolled by Clarence ‘Hard Tack’ Clussner, a retired security guard who worked for the Winn-Dixie grocery chain for over 35 years.  Clarence is good people.  He doesn’t look for trouble, but he doesn’t walk away from it, either.  He once snatched a turkey leg from a shoplifter and then beat him to within an inch of his life with it.  Trust me, that was the last time anybody tried to steal poultry from a Winn-Dixie in Jacksonville, Florida.”

We asked J-Kush if relocating Silent Sam to such a high-profile, sacred location would send the wrong message to the American people about how the President views the role of slavery in U.S. history.

“No, I don’t think so.”

Well, OK then.  Stay tuned.  

 

According to The Columbia Daily Spectator, Barnard College will soon install a vending machine outside of its health care center that will dispense emergency contraceptives. 

Nice gesture, Barnard, but you folks are a bit late to the party.  While you’ve been mulling over this decision for God-knows-how-long, here’s what other schools have been doing:

—  On every floor of every dormitory at Syracuse University there is a small cabinet mounted in the hallway that is clearly marked, “Break glass in case of sex.”  The cabinet contains three condoms and a CD by Drake.  According to Dean of Students Lyle Blenz, “we used to have traditional vending machines that stocked condoms, but there’s nothing sadder than seeing a couple of naked sophomores, draped in an afghan knitted by one of their grandmothers, arguing loudly in front of a vending machine at 2:00 a.m. about who forgot to bring quarters.  It’s a whole lot simpler to just give the damn things away.”

— At Colby College in Maine they’ve taken things a step further.  Every Purell Hand Sanitizer Dispenser on campus has been retrofitted so that a swipe of a student’s ID card produces a single, university-strength, steel-belted-radial Trailblazer condom manufactured by Trojan.  Students love the convenience.  As junior Haddon Twenny put it, “You never know who you might connect with in any given class on any given day.  This way, I’m all set for whatever happens.  Having sex after an 8:00 a.m. Stats class rules!”

—  A more holistic approach is taken by the University of Southern California, where its Office of Enhanced Student Life offers a Partner Identification Service (PIDS) to assist students in finding out the names of the individuals they slept with the night before. 

Staffed by retired police detectives, PIDS claims to have an 84% success rate in identifying partners.  According to Senior Investigator Charles “Biff” Cranley, “I’m 72 now, but I was young once.  I understand.  These kids gets all excited and forget to ask for the basics, like the name of the other person.  We help them retrace their steps so they can narrow down the possibilities.  It’s a great feeling when you locate the right individual, and the student smiles at you and says, ‘Yep, that’s the one.  Thanks so much!’  Hell, sometimes the two of them even go out on an old-fashioned date after being reunited.  I worked in Homicide for 35 years, but right now I’m having the time of my life!”

—  Of course, not every school moves at the same speed when it comes to addressing sexuality and young people in the 21st century.  At Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, for example, the administration is proud of its new “Where Do Christian Babies Come From?” curriculum, featuring instructional videos in which key concepts are demonstrated by kittens, otters, and (for Seniors only) African bush elephants.  In the words of Winifred “Winnie” Frohlstrom, Vice President for Student Chastity, “at Bob Jones we’re committed to graduating students who display a mature attitude toward physical intimacy with the opposite sex while also being wildlife-sensitive.”

Now there’s a goal that University Life hopes we can all endorse.