Author: Michael Morris

On November 17th The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that over two dozen academic programs at the University of Wisconsin at Superior were being cut because students “tend to get overwhelmed by too many course offerings,” which “cause them to take too many credits, incur too much debt and take too long to graduate.”  (Unfortunately, the preceding sentence is not a joke.)

Well, the agonizing wait for the other shoe to drop ended yesterday, when the University announced a drastic reduction in the number of choices that students will be offered in the school’s cafeteria.  According to a University spokesperson, “the wide range of cuisine options we’ve been providing has produced two major problems.  First, some students are simply immobilized by having so many choices.  As a result, they often take an extraordinarily long time to make their meal selection, and end up being late for class.  Indeed, a subgroup of these students finds it impossible to decide, so they eat nothing, and within a few weeks they show up at our health clinic suffering from severe malnutrition. 

“At the other extreme we have students who sample virtually every item available at any given meal, and by the end of the semester they are morbidly obese.  For example, a typical lunch in our cafeteria features pizza, a burger/frankfurter/fry station, a fish entrée, a chicken entrée, a beef entrée, a cold-cuts sandwich counter, a salad bar, a hummus hut, and of course there’s Cheese World.  Is it any wonder that our campus has the largest percentage of students weighing over 400 pounds in the country?  The single most frequent reason for students dropping out of our school is not poor grades or insufficient finances; it’s sudden death via cholesterol-induced cardiac arrest.  We’re the only campus in the nation with a student-run post-heart-attack support group (“Keep Ticking”) for 20-year-olds.  We must stop the madness!”

After the Thanksgiving break, every meal at the University of Wisconsin at Superior will offer just one selection.  On November 27th, breakfast will consist of creamed chipped beef on toast, followed by a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch (choice of Swiss with or without holes), and dinner will be pork chops served with applesauce.  Dessert?  One scoop of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream.  Students with nut allergies will be given a dessert voucher that must be used at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls campus within 24 hours.

Student response to the University’s latest action has been swift, with an evening protest march planned for November 28th to demand that the dessert vouchers be honored at the nearby Sweeden Sweets on Culver Avenue.  Every participant will carry a flaming waffle cone torch, held high. 

A growing number of colleges and universities have entered into the admissions wonderland known as Instant Decision Day, where high school seniors can apply, interview, and receive an admissions decision all in a single day.

Wow.

As you might suspect, IDD (not to be confused with an IUD, which is a whole other thing) is in large part a response to the intense competition for undergraduates that currently characterizes higher education.  Of course, as more and more institutions adopt the IDD approach, the competitive advantage that this strategy gives to any particular school diminishes over time. 

Damn.

Recognizing this problem, Smecklin College in Chicago has broken away from the pack.  In its highly successful See You in September initiative,  selected groups of high school seniors who have NOT applied to Smecklin are notified that they have been accepted by the college, and that their Fall semester tuition is due within 30 days.  According to Gary Peff, Dean of Admissions at Smecklin, “We’re operating with a new paradigm here.  Instead of trying to convince students to come to us, we simply inform them that they’re already part of the Smecklin community.  The burden is on them to justify any decision they might make not to attend Smecklin.”

Peff acknowledges that intimidation plays a significant role in the See You in September program.  “We send a certified letter of acceptance to the non-applicant that includes an explicit warning concerning the legal consequences of failing to pay one’s bills.  We don’t shy away from mentioning prison or, in the case of immigrants, deportation.”

Do young people and their parents actually take these threats seriously?  “Absolutely,” says Peff.  “We target students with GPA’s in the bottom 10% of their graduating class.  Let’s be honest, these are not bulbs that are burning very brightly.  And yes, they do require extensive remedial services once they arrive on campus in the fall, but we employ the University of North Carolina Unsupervised Independent Study Program (UNC-UISP) that has been recognized by the NCAA for its ability to keep kids in school.  It works really well for us, especially in conjunction with the recent decision of our Faculty Senate to eliminate the grade of F as an option for instructors to use at the end of the semester.  It also helps that we tell students that they can be arrested for leaving Smecklin without completing their degree.  Our graduation statistics are now based on a 15-year time frame from entry to exit, rather than 4, 5, or 6 years.”

What will Smecklin do if other schools copy the See You in September approach?  Peff just smiles. “Don’t worry, we’ll be ready.”

 

 

The legacy of slavery continues to haunt prestigious universities in the United States.  On November 6th The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the first nine Presidents of Princeton University owned slaves.  As embarrassing as this revelation is, the front-runner for the 2017 Gold Medal for Slavery-Related Shame would have to be Sons of the Confederacy Bible College in Brackish Springs, Mississippi, which only learned last week that chattel slavery had been abolished in the U.S.

“We are profoundly sorry for our ignorance of such a historic event,” announced Reverend Samuel Poutine, President of the College.  “This is our bad.  Since the College’s founding in 1862, we’ve devoted ourselves exclusively to the study of the Old Testament and the lessons this sacred document holds for all of God’s children.  I guess we should have paid more attention to what was going on in the world around us.  We had no idea that the Negroes had been freed.  It looks like we’ll be having some awkward conversations with the folks on our campus who’ve worked for decades in maintenance, the student cafeteria, and our award-winning vegetable garden.  They’re going to be extremely upset, and who can blame them?  It’s kind of funny, but I had always wondered how we kept our tuition so low, compared to what they charge at the Wesley Biblical Seminary up in Jackson.  Well, now I know.  Labor Costs Matter!”

Details of the College’s plans to sell most of its bloodhounds will be released soon.

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times revealed the identity of the only individual in Hollywood who did NOT know that Harvey Weinstein had been sexually harassing and assaulting women on a regular basis over the past several decades.  His name is Ernest Carroll Moore, who served as UCLA’s first Provost from 1919 to 1936.  Dr. Moore died in 1955, when Mr. Weinstein was 3 years old.  However, in June 1954 Dr. Moore was overheard saying to a friend at the Brown Derby restaurant on Hollywood’s North Vine Street, “Something about that kid really bothers me.” 

According to Professor Melanie Flynch-Tutweiler, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, the last time that so many people in Tinseltown failed to speak up when they should have was during the infamous “Can You Hear Me Now?” Scandal, from 1931 to 1961, when no one would tell movie legend Clark Gable that his ears were freakishly large.

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education headline asked, “Should Colleges Intervene to Stop Heckling of Campus Speakers?”

An important question, to be sure. 

But it’s yesterday’s news. 

Reports from around the country indicate that student activists have moved beyond heckling.  Now they are tickling…..with a vengeance.  At the University of Louisville last week, white-supremacist wingnut Richard B. Spencer was giving the keynote address at a “50 Shades of Pale” conference when three male students in ski masks rushed the stage and wrestled him to the floor behind the lectern.  As two of the students held him down and pulled up his shirt, the third tickled him with a guineafowl feather until he wet his pants.  A humiliated Spencer scooted from the stage on his rear end while holding his lecture notes over his lap. 

Similar events have occurred over the past two months at the University of New Hampshire, Lafayette College, and Idaho State University.  University officials aren’t sure how to respond.  “Cubby” Dixon, Dean of Student Life at Idaho State, laments that his school doesn’t have a specific policy that regulates tickling on campus.  Interestingly, tickling is actually encouraged, and taught, as a foreplay technique in the two-day Safe Sex Workshop (“Passionate Potatoes”) that all first-year ISU students are required to take during Orientation Week.  “It looks like the Workshop may have come back to haunt us,” Dixon observes.  “Our students have become really skilled at tickling.  On the other hand, it’s nice to hear all the squealing and giggling coming out of the dorm windows at night.”

It’s unlikely that student protestors will stop at tickling.  Just two days ago at Grinnell College, Ann Coulter was slathered in creamed corn while participating in a Young Republicans symposium on “Tall Conservative Women Who Aren’t Laura Ingraham,” while Milo Yiannopoulous was forcibly massaged with Texas-style dry-rub seasoning at an alt-right rally at Baylor University on Halloween.  Responsibility for both incidents was claimed by the Revolutionary Intersectionality Brigade (Manifesto: “You can’t just be one thing!”), a rogue student collective with ties to a Whole Foods Market in Madison, Wisconsin that is violently resisting Amazon’s takeover of the Whole Foods chain.  A siege of the market by FDA agents is now in its third week, with latest reports indicating that agents have taken control of the Produce section after heavy fighting.  Casualties include scores of severely bruised fruit, with many melons of all types not expected to survive.  “There’s pulp everywhere,” says one FDA agent who has been inside the store. “We’re having to use DNA swabs to identify some of the cantaloupes.”

College administrators may soon be looking back fondly at the days when all they had to worry about was heckling.

In what appears to be a first in modern U.S. higher education, a university has appointed a President who does not possess a college degree.  At a press conference yesterday the University of Oklahoma announced that its next leader will be Mr. Timothy “Sparky” Cretch, a 22-year-old high school dropout with extensive experience in website design. 

According to Clayton Bennett, Chair of the University’s Board of Regents, “In the fierce, steel-cage death match that characterizes competition for college students today, a school without a killer website is toast.  Mr. Cretch is widely regarded as the premier website designer of his generation.  His Oregon company — Scroll, Baby, Scroll! — has grown from a $15,000 start-up in 2011, specializing in the development of sites for marijuana dispensaries and 10-lane bowling alleys, into a $325 million industry giant that works with numerous Fortune 500 companies and governments of foreign countries.  Sparky is the real deal!  Higher education is about more than just having a good Division I football team.  Prospective students want to interact with a website that provides them with a totally immersive scroll-and-click experience.  We don’t want you to simply ‘visit’ the Oklahoma website, we want you to climb inside its welcoming womb and be bathed in the nurturing amniotic fluid of our institution’s culture.  By the time you emerge, you’ll literally be drenched in your desire to become a Sooner.”

Mr. Timlin, who appeared at the press conference attired in cargo shorts, deck shoes, an inside-out Portland Trail Blazers tee shirt, and an Oregon Ducks baseball cap, joked that “I’ll probably have to buy myself some Oklahoma gear in the next few days, but I know that being President here is going to be AWESOME!  We’re going to have the first website in the country that provides a Five Senses Tour of the campus.  You’ll actually be able to smell the lawn on our quad, taste the ice cream in our cafeteria by licking the screen, and feel your body splash in the water of one of our Olympic-size residence hall swimming pools.  We’re going to blow away every other college website in the country.  But what’s up with this ‘Sooner’ nickname?    ‘Sooner’ than what, exactly?  I don’t get it.  It’s gotta go.”

The NCAA praised the University of North Carolina last week for including non-athletes in its long-standing practice of offering sham courses to students who needed an easy A with no work.  According to NCAA President Mark Emmert, “So often, colleges and universities bend the rules for athletes but don’t provide similar opportunities to rank-and-file students who are just as academically clueless as many Division I basketball and football players.  At North Carolina, every student could benefit from doing virtually nothing in a course while getting a passing grade.  This is a tradition that unites rather than divides athletes and non-athletes on campus.  We applaud UNC for its commitment to community.”

UNC Chancellor Carol Folt gracefully accepted the NCAA’s recognition: “Though UNC has been a pillar of the North Carolina Research Triangle for decades, we have always felt uncomfortable participating in a culture that celebrated academic excellence, a culture that called into question stereotypes of the American South as a cesspool of flaming ignorance.  Well, as a loyal Tar Heel I’m proud to report, “We’re bringing the STINK back, and that pungent smell is not just for athletes!”

In an October 13th article entitled “How the Academic Elite Reproduces Itself” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the authors cite research indicating that “graduates from a few elite institutions account for an outsized proportion of high-profile published work.” 

Hmmm…..sounds like there could be a scandal brewing here.  So, as a service to University Life readers, I put on my investigative reporter hat and conducted phone interviews with the Presidents of several of the institutions mentioned in the article, asking for their explanations of this finding.  Here’s what they said:

Drew Gilpin Faust (Harvard): “Virtually all of our doctoral students come from a eugenics breeding farm that the University maintains in Chesuncook, Maine.  It works out well for us, though occasionally a gene-splicing error produces a physics Ph.D. with an extra ear or a mathematician with zero interpersonal skills and poor personal hygiene habits.  Okay, okay….maybe the second problem occurs more than just occasionally.”

Ronald Daniels (Johns Hopkins): “It’s the crab cakes.  Here in Baltimore we have the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and those babies rock!  Incredibly tasty, and the ultimate brain food.  Make sure to use Old Bay High-Citation Seasoning and buy the lump meat, not the claw.  Psych students who get the less expensive claw meat end up publishing in places like Highlights Magazine rather than Developmental Psychology.  A damn shame.”

Martha Pollack (Cornell): “It must be all the hills on our Ithaca campus.  Climb, descend, climb, descend, climb, descend.  Up, down, up, down, up, down.  It NEVER ends.  Exercises the mind as well as the body, I guess.  But I’m so sick of it.  My lower legs look like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s during his prime, and they ache constantly.  If the Board of Trustees let me, I’d bring in a bunch of road graders and level the whole freakin’ landscape!  You’re not recording this, are you?”

Christopher Eisgruber (Princeton): “You’re kidding, right?  We’re PRINCETON!  God ADORES us.  Haven’t you heard of the Divine Right of Kings?  Everything we touch becomes golden, sparkly, and brilliant…..a snow globe filled with all the world’s knowledge, shimmering like the Aurora Borealis.  Why the hell we’re in New Jersey, I’ll never know.”

Carol Crist (Berkeley) and Marc Tessier-Lavigne (Stanford) [conference call]: “You have NO idea how much high-octane pot we smoke out here!  We buy it in 500-lb. bales, divide it up into compressed bricks, and then distribute the bricks to graduate students at orientation.  The impact on the quality of their scholarly work is MASSIVE!  Or maybe it’s just the Doritos.  Who the hell knows?  HA-HA-HA-HA-HA………. [raucous laughter continues for 10 minutes, with background noises suggesting that Tessier-Lavigne has tumbled out of his chair onto the floor].”

There you have it.  Question asked, and answered.  No scandal here, folks.

 

 

“Should Universities Ban Single-Gender Discussion Panels?”  This was the title of an October 4th article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which reported the recent controversial decision of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University to prohibit single-gender panels in order to increase the sharing of diverse perspectives.  Reasonable people can probably disagree over the wisdom of such a policy, but there’s little doubt that rigid adherence to it can lead to the sort of awkward situation that occurred last week at the Stubblefield School of Nursing at Northern South Central Community College in Wichita, Kansas.

In Obstetrics 231 the topic of the day was, “What Does It Feel Like to Give Birth?”  A panel of four NSCCC students — three young mothers and Toby Scalfani, a 20-year-old member of the men’s lacrosse team — participated.  A rich exchange among the three women occupied the first half-hour of the session, at which point Mr. Scalfani was asked to share his lived experience of childbirth.  “Wow, this is a tough one,” he responded, vigorously scratching his head.  “But now that I think of it, I did get hit in the crotch with a lacrosse ball during a game with Wichita State last year, and believe me, that was no fun.  I had to sit out the rest of the game, and I won’t even describe what it looked like down there.  Lacrosse balls are solid, not hollow like tennis balls.  When I got home that night, all I could keep down was some chicken broth that my mom made for me.  So, yeah, I kinda know what it feels like to have a kid.  It hurts big time!

“Did you know that a lacrosse ball can travel over 100 miles per hour when it’s flung by a lacrosse stick?  A couple of weeks ago my friend Spackle demolished the door of a Dodge Ram 1500 when he took a close-up shot at it over at the car dealership that Brad Guernsey’s dad owns.  It was midnight and we were pretty wasted.  Lacrosse rules, man!”

Results of the panel were mixed.  Several students in attendance decided to form a women’s lacrosse team, thereby strengthening NSCCC’s compliance with Title IX regulations.  On the other hand, nearly half of the females who completed a post-panel survey indicated that they were re-thinking their decision to have children, especially if those children might turn out to be boys. 

For years it has been common practice for many college football powers to begin their season by feasting on a less competitive program (e.g., in 2017 see Clemson vs. Kent State, Penn State vs. Akron, and Oklahoma vs. Texas/El Paso).  The game provides a tune-up for the football power’s varsity players and a big paycheck for the weaker school.  Heads turned, however, when the University of Alabama announced this week that it will start its 2018 football campaign by traveling to New England to play the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).  Initial reaction around the country was one of shock.  NFL commentator and former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw exclaimed, “This is madness!  The average Alabama defensive lineman weighs over 360 pounds, while there is no RISD offensive lineman who tips the scales at more than 175, soaking wet.  Those Rhode Island kids are risking life-threatening injuries!”

Even PETA has entered the conversation, with its President Ingrid Newkirk remarking, “I know we’ve traditionally focused our attention on protecting non-humans, but this game would be an abomination.  Really, it’s no different than stuffing a litter of kittens into a burlap sack and driving over them — repeatedly — in a Cadillac Escalade.”

In response, RISD President Rosanne Somerson promised that the school would triple the number of ambulances on the sidelines during the game, and build what will amount to a MASH unit in the parking lot adjacent to the field.  “We’ll be ready for whatever happens, and all of the RISD players’ next of kin will be admitted free to the game.  We want them to be immediately available in the event of a worst-case scenario.”

When asked by reporters what his game plan will be for the contest, RISD football coach and part-time Ceramics Professor Jason Sedgeway commented, “On offense we’ll do the following: take a knee on 1st down, take a knee on 2nd down, take a knee on 3rd down, and then punt.  On defense we’ll just get out of the way as soon as they hike the ball.  Many of our players have asthma and use an inhaler, while several others suffer from anxiety disorders as a result of being bullied for their artistic interests when they were young.  Their safety is more important to me than the final score.”

For his part, Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban views the match-up as “just another game,” a sentiment shared by his players.  Defensive linemen Ray-Bob Tucker and Bobby Ray Simms, affectionately known as ‘Thing One’ and ‘Thing Two’ to Alabama fans, told reporters, “It doesn’t matter who our opponent is.  Our job is to find the person with the ball and stop him from moving forward.  If we do our job right, they won’t ever want to move that ball forward again.  Hell, they won’t ever want to touch that ball again.”

When asked why she would agree to schedule such a dangerous mismatch, President Somerson pointed out that “people don’t have a clue how difficult it is to raise funds for an arts school in today’s economic climate.  Quite frankly, we’re desperate, and we can’t rely on David Byrne to give us royalties from his Talking Heads albums forever.”

Las Vegas odds-makers have declined to issue a point spread for the game.