University Life

Given the health risks posed by COVID-19, it’s no surprise that The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured an article entitled “Why the Fall Will Be a Liability Minefield” for colleges and universities (May 29 online). 

Instead of being immobilized by this challenge, Middlebury College in Vermont is embracing it.  When students return to campus in August, they will find that the second floor of the McCullough Student Center has been converted into a honeycomb of offices representing legal firms they can easily access for lawsuit assistance.   

As Middlebury President Laurie Patton put it, “we know that we are putting students in harm’s way by bringing them back here with no vaccine available.  And given our liberal worldview, we feel really guilty about that, just as we feel really guilty about every thought we think and every action we take at Middlebury, every day of the year.  By making it convenient for students to sue us, we hope to send a message that says, ‘we may be screwing you, but we’re doing our best to help you screw us’.

“We are committed to resolving all cases within 48 hours of their being filed, and that includes weekends.  A branch of the town’s municipal court will be housed on the first floor of McCullough, and it will be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  A judge will sleep on the premises. 

“We plan to offer a $10,000 settlement to every plaintiff.  With Middlebury’s endowment at $1.1 billion, and fewer than 3,000 students enrolled, we should be able to handle this.

“These procedures can only be used for coronavirus-related cases.  Legal complaints concerning racial injustice, gender bias, and sexual harassment must be filed in person by the complaining party at the State Superior Court in Montpelier.  A faculty task force is hard at work developing an expedited process for these allegations, and their preliminary report is due to be released in October 2021.”

With respect to COVID-19, students receiving Pell Grants can choose to be represented by the Vermont Legal Assistance Clinic or by Bob LeGruyère, a local attorney who specializes in class-action suits involving lead-tainted maple syrup.  Students paying full tuition will be represented by senior attorneys from Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and during the initial interview will enjoy a delicious 3-course meal catered by Wolfgang Puck’s nephew, Dingo Flanelle. 

The positive consequences of Middlebury’s initiative are already being noticed, even before students return to campus.   According to President Patton, “I’m sleeping better now than I have in years.  It feels good to give!”

University leaders across the country, take note. 

In the wake of East Carolina University’s decision to eliminate its swimming and diving teams due to budget problems exacerbated by the pandemic (true fact), a near-tragedy took place 3,000 miles away in Berkeley, California, home of the University of California’s swimming program, a perennial NCAA powerhouse.  University Life has obtained the details:

On May 23rd, University of California officials proudly announced that the school would not terminate its swimming program.  However, they failed to communicate that they would attempt to save money over the summer by draining the pool and turning off all the lights in the team’s training facility.  

What officials did not realize was that the men’s diving team has a long tradition of holding a secret practice at midnight on Memorial Day. 

“It’s just a way of getting the guys together and bonding in preparation for the fall season,” says Asher Blake, team co-captain.  “When we snuck into the Spieker Aquatic Complex just after midnight on May 25th, we were annoyed that the lights wouldn’t come on, but it was no big deal.  Even in the dark, we knew where the pool was.  

“The first sign that something was definitely wrong was when Hayden Tiff, our top competitor on the 27-meter platform, did his signature jackknife dive.  Instead of hearing the brief, sharp splash of his body entering the water, what filled the air resembled the sound of a large cockroach being stepped on in a tenement kitchen. 

“Grayson Fenz immediately cannonballed from the platform to find out what the problem was, and we heard the same sickening crunch.  Three more guys followed him before somebody grabbed a flashlight and we looked into the pool.

“Jesus H. Christ, it was a freakin’ train wreck down there!  Looked like the basement of Alpha Kappa Lambda after a Saturday night keg party.  Bodies splayed all over the place.  Fortunately, nobody suffered anything worse than a mild concussion, and everyone is expected to fully recover.  We dodged a bullet, man!

“The doctor in the emergency room told us that the brains of high-divers are significantly smaller, and their skulls thicker and harder, than the brains of non-divers.  It’s a scientific fact.  I guess that kind of explains why we dove into an empty pool in the first place, and why our injuries weren’t more serious.  Awesome!”

Across the country, sales of adult diapers have soared in cities and towns that house institutions of higher learning, as perspiration-drenched administrators attempt, in the midst of the pandemic, to plan for the Fall 2020 semester.  As one anonymous college president put it, “I’ve gotten used to soiling myself whenever we have a Zoom session to discuss how, and whether, to bring students back to campus in September.  Thank God we’re not meeting in person!  No room deodorizer on the planet could neutralize what I’m putting out there these days.”

Enter the University of Alabama, which is about to rewrite the playbook for creatively dealing with the havoc wreaked by COVID-19.  Yesterday it announced that on August 1st the University will be taken over by the school’s phenomenally successful NCAA Division 1 football program.  All academic and research divisions of the institution will officially become extra-curricular activities that students can participate in if they wish.   The new, restructured entity will simply be known as Crimson Tide, and the University of Alabama name will be retired.    

In a hastily called press conference, Dr. James Purcell, Executive Director of the state’s Commission on Higher Education, explained the change:

“The current pandemic has laid bare the vulnerability of institutions that prioritize academic pursuits.  Knowledge building and the communication of knowledge to students no longer represent viable, sustainable endeavors in the modern world.  In Alabama, however, we are blessed with the most successful college football operation on earth.  Indeed, you can travel to lands as far away as Yemen, Papua New Guinea, or Tasmania and find scores of street urchins proudly wearing Crimson Tide tee shirts.  It’s time to let head coach Nick Saban and his team chart the future of higher education in our beloved Cotton State. 

“Let’s face facts.  The University of Alabama was established in 1820.  The school has had 200 years to educate the residents of our state.  Can anyone look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that our citizens are any less dumb now than they were in 1820? 

“I’m waiting.

“I didn’t think so. 

“Come this  fall, I guarantee you that Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa will be filled with students and alumni, masks or no masks.  Fans over 70 years old will be seated in their own special section, which will be equipped with ventilators.  And cheerleaders will disinfect the players with full-body sanitizing wipes after every change of possession.

“Would this model of higher education work at Yale or Amherst?  Probably not, but that’s not my problem.  It’s going to work for us.”

Some schools have “flipped the classroom” in recent years.  In Alabama, they’re flipping the institution.  Stay tuned.  

Liberty University, the evangelical Christian institution in Lynchburg, VA, can’t stop making headlines.  At the end of June the school plans to shut down its Philosophy Department.  No joke. 

At first glance, getting rid of a Philosophy Department in a university that stresses the importance of religion might seem a bit strange.  But when Liberty President Jerry Falwell, Jr. explained his reasoning at a May 13th press conference, it all made sense.  His comments:

“I visited the Philosophy Department website the other day and found this sentence: ‘The philosophy degree at Liberty develops the whole person and will prepare you for a lifetime of problem-solving and critical thinking.’  

“My immediate reaction was: Are you f**king kidding me?  Where did they come up with this bulls**t?   If there’s a bullet train to Hell and eternal damnation that’s any faster and more direct than critical thinking, I have yet to see it.  Once you get on board, it’s impossible to get off.  You start questioning EVERYTHING:  ‘Oh Professor, I don’t find the biblical story of Eve being created from Adam’s rib to be compelling.  Did armadillos come from his collarbone?  Did pussy cats come from Eve’s special place?’ 

“Next thing you know, you’ve got hoards of students dressed up like KISS, fornicating in the cafeteria’s dessert line, humping like Satanic hamsters in heat, spread-eagled all over the plastic shields that are supposed to protect the apple crisp and peach cobbler.  Believe me, that’s the last thing we need on our campus right now as we try to enforce social distancing during the pandemic.  I’m sorry, but Philosophy must go.”

Now that’s a compelling argument, no matter what your religious beliefs are.  This round goes to President Falwell. 

 

As the pandemic continues to plague our nation, colleges and universities have been grappling with the challenge of what to do about grades in Spring 2020 courses.  Many schools have chosen the familiar option of Pass/Fail, but Syracuse University has followed a different path.  Its instructors can select one of the following when submitting grades this semester:  

• “Pass with Distinction”
• “Pass”
• “Saved by COVID-19”

According to Syracuse Chancellor Kent Syverud, “our students have been traumatized enough by the coronavirus.  The last thing they need right now is a stigmatizing F on their transcript, bleeding all over the page like a stuck pig on a paper towel.  Although ‘Saved by COVID-19’ is certainly no badge of honor, it’s not as hurtful as an F, and it doesn’t lower your GPA.

“In essence, NO ONE is going to fail ANYTHING at Syracuse University this term.  It’s the least we can do for our students, given that we’ve barred them from campus since Spring Break.  There’s no way we can ever make up for all the sex and alcohol they’ve missed over the past few months because they’ve been living at home with their parents, but eliminating F’s is something we can give them.” 

Student reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.  Randy Loofer, a Pre-Med major from Utica, New York, is ecstatic.  “I was definitely headed for an F in Organic Chemistry this semester.  I had gotten a 12 on the midterm exam, and that was higher than any of my quiz scores.  My goal of becoming a brain surgeon was going down the tubes.  But now I’m back in business, baby, and it’s awesome!  Mom and Dad, can you still get me a Watson-Cheyne dissecting probe with my initials on it for my birthday?  I love you!”

President Syverud, give yourself an A for your performance this semester.  And we’re not grading on a curve.  

 

 

 

True Fact:  Southern New Hampshire University recently announced that its incoming Fall 2020 freshmen would pay NO TUITION for their first year at the school.  That’s right — these students will attend SNHU tuition-free for one year.

Wow.  

One imagines SNHU President Paul LeBlanc delivering this bombshell to a bunch of college and university presidents at a TED Talk, then dropping his microphone on the stage as he saunters off, flashing a sly smile that says, “Top that, boys and girls!  At SNHU, we put the ‘dis’ in ‘disruption’.”  

Not so fast, Wonder Boy.

Candida College in Rutland, Vermont has responded with an offer that’s even more daring.  

At a press conference three days ago, Candida President Carson “Sonny” Tarpinsky indicated that not only would the upcoming academic year be tuition-free for its freshmen, it would also be the case that each of these students would be paid $10,000 by the school for attending in 2020-21.  Tarpinsky ended his prepared remarks by inviting President LeBlanc to “bite me.”

The proceedings took an awkward turn, however, when a reporter asked Tarpinsky about the financial implications of this offer for Candida, a school with an endowment of less than $2 million.  The President turned to Candida’s Chief Financial Officer, Len Honus, who silently mouthed the words “HOLY S**T!” and smacked his forehead while gazing at Tarpinsky.

Maintaining his cool, the President told the reporter that he would get back to her soon with an answer to that question.

In a related story, Rutland police are seeking the public’s help in locating Mr. Honus, who has not been seen since the press conference.  The police have identified the Mongo brothers, Jeremy and Jessie, as “persons of interest” in the case.  They were last spotted in the vicinity of Lake Bomoseen, near the town of Castleton, carrying a chainsaw and overstuffed duffel bag.  Anyone encountering the pair should call 911, and refrain from engaging them directly.  

 

 

Transitioning to online instruction during the COVID-19 crisis has been challenging for many professors and students, but in the midst of all this frustration the number of heartwarming episodes is growing.  Here are three of the more inspiring ones that have come to the attention of University Life:

—  Jake “Flipper” Swensen, a University of Florida sophomore, was beyond embarrassed when his bong exploded while he was taking an online exam in his Political Science course, Blondes in the Swedish Parliament.  His laptop was totalled, the keyboard drenched in water and hashish goo.  Rather than penalizing Flipper, Professor Roland Thunst sent him a replacement laptop at his own expense via Amazon Prime.  

Thunst observed that “accidents happen.  Hell, I was a poster child for LSD consumption during my graduate school days in the early 1970s.  Whoa, just had a flashback where my arms turn into pterodactyl wings.  Awesome!  But why do my feet look like cream cheese?”

“I wish our school had more professors like Dr. Thunst,” says Flipper.  “He gets me.”

—  English Professor Dwight Cuspy was a well-known campus curmudgeon at Franklin & Marshall College even before the pandemic, and being ordered to take his courses online did nothing to improve his temperament.  Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that he played a nasty little practical joke on the students in his Southern Literature class, asking them to write an analytical essay on “The Dirt under McAfee’s Nails,” a novella by William Faulkner.  No such novella exists, and students spent an infuriating 24 hours scouring the Internet for it before Cuspy informed them of the deception. 

Brandon Yazpoh was not amused.  A disgruntled English major whose hobby was starting small fires, Yazpoh found out where Cuspy lived and proceeded to set his two-car garage ablaze in the middle of the night, burning it to the ground. 

As he walked back to his apartment after the incident, Yazpoh had an epiphany, realizing that what he had done was wrong — seriously wrong.  He went to the police and confessed, offering to organize a group of students to rebuild the garage, “just like an old-fashioned barn-raising.” 

The professor was so touched by the gesture that he chose not to press charges, and plans to write a letter of recommendation for Brandon when he applies to law school.  Says Cuspy: “I think we both learned a lot from this episode.”

—  At the University of Vermont, beloved Cinema Studies faculty member Marvin Quofmanian thought he was downloading a lecture on “Themes from Chekhov and Woody Allen in the Fast and Furious Franchise” for his class to view.  Unfortunately, he mistakenly downloaded a pornographic video showing him being spanked by a prostitute dressed as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Humiliated, Quofmanian was on the verge of ending his life by locking himself in a walk-in freezer at an abandoned Wendy’s, but his students intervened.   They organized a GoFundMe campaign that raised over $47,000, hoping to hire Meryl Streep to play Thatcher in a new spanking video that would co-star the professor and be directed by a student from the class.  Streep, of course, won an Academy Award for portraying the Prime Minister in the 2011 film “The Iron Lady.”

Streep accepted the role, saying that she was proud to do her part to help others during the pandemic.  She will donate the $47,000 to a local charity that funds petting zoos in juvenile detention facilities. 

Quofmanian was beside himself with joy and appreciation.  “To be in a video with Meryl Streep, doing what we’ll be doing — without shame — is beyond my wildest dreams.  These students are the best.  God bless them!”

Ouch…Ouch…Ouch!  In a good way. 

 

It’s no secret that many colleges and universities are terrified that large numbers of high school seniors will go online for their first year of college in Fall 2020, resulting in scores of semi-deserted brick-and-mortar campuses around the nation. 

As it turns out, higher education is not being paranoid.

Yesterday, the Pew Research Center released the results of a study indicating that virtually every college-bound senior in the United States plans to attend Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), an online behemoth, in September.  

According to Pew Director of Survey Research Courtney Kennedy, “the only students who aren’t going to SNHU in the Fall are those who have been accepted by an Ivy League school or Liberty University, an evangelical Christian institution in Virginia.  What this means is that well over 2.5 million new students will enroll at SNHU over the next few months.”

The school’s Chief Marketing Officer, Alana Burns, is confident that SNHU will be ready for them: “We already serve about 87,000 online students.  Adding 2 or 3 million more should not be a problem.  As we like to say at SNHU, “We’ve got the bandwidth, if you’ve got the tuition.”

Couldn’t such a gigantic shift of students to one institution undermine the very foundations of higher education in America?

When SNHU President Paul LeBlanc was asked this question by a reporter, his response was immediate: “Well, I certainly hope so.  At SNHU, we’re all about market dominance.  We have no quarrel with the Ivy League educating the future Masters of the Universe.  We just want to educate everyone else, or at least give them credentials.  And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

What will happen to all those administrators, faculty, and staff now working at other institutions?

“Let’s face it,” LeBlanc observed, “the pandemic is likely to be with us for at least the next decade.  Do you have any idea how huge the demand is going to be for front-line, low-wage, underinsured health care workers?  These folks don’t grow on trees, you know.  It’s time for the higher education workforce to reinvent itself.  By the way, our new B.S. program in Ventilator Maintenance and Repair begins in January 2021.  If you’re a Literature Professor accustomed to teaching honors seminars with titles like Crucifixion Imagery in 16th-Century French Poetry, it might be a good idea to take off your Proustian wire-rim glasses, empty into the sink your shot glass full of absinthe, and get yourself a Pell Grant.  Spring 2021 classes begin on January 5th, and the SNHU application deadline is January 4th.”

Faculty near and far, please say hello to the future. 

With colleges and universities hemorrhaging alarming amounts of money due to the pandemic, institutions are searching for creative strategies to offset their losses.  Leading the way is Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, which will offer a one-day virtual conference, The Toilet Paper Summit (TPS-1), on May 11th.  

According to Bucknell President John Bravman, “all the data indicate that severe toilet paper shortages will continue to plague the United States long after the COVID-19 crisis passes.  We plan to bring together scholars from around the globe to address this issue.”

Here is the tentative schedule for TPS-1:

9:00 am   Keynote Address — “Biological Necessity or Capitalist Control Mechanism? A Post-Modernist Perspective on Bowel Movements” — Nigel Wiffton-Pipsey, Professor of Philosophical Biology, King’s College London

10:00 am   “Folding vs. Scrunching TP in a Time of Scarcity: Implications of Findings from the 2020 Scandinavian Sanitary-Practices Survey”

11:00 am   “Repurposing the Sunday New York Times for Bathroom Use:  Which Sections Work Best?”

11:45 am   Breakout Session 1:  “Can the Toilet Paper Crisis Save the Newspaper Industry?”

11:45 am   Breakout Session 2:   “Damn, That Hurts!  Glossy Magazines and the Challenge of Delicate-Area Paper Cuts”  (Sponsored by the Aloe Foundation of North America)

12:30 pm   Lunch in Place

1:15 pm     “The Last Resort: Raiding Your Home Library”

2:00 pm     Breakout Session 3:  “Saying Goodbye to Your Favorite Novels:  Grief Management Strategies”  (Panel discussion with Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith, Richard Russo, and Margaret Atwood)

2:00 pm     Breakout Session 4:   “Wise Decision in Retrospect? Not Discarding Those Stacks of Unread New Yorkers”

2:45 pm      “Running Here, There, and Everywhere:  A Conversation with Survivors of the 1952 Spoiled Burrito Panic”  (Sponsored by Taco Bell)

3:45 pm      Ethics Roundtable:  “Public Restrooms, Toilet Paper Theft, and the Common Good” (Jared Kushner, Session Chair)

4:30 pm       Closing Plenary: “Bridge Over Troubled Water” performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — Mike Pence, Guest Soloist

Registration for the Conference is $250.  Partial scholarships are available for furloughed faculty.

 

 

 

Higher education experts believe that COVID-19 could bring many colleges and universities to their knees, but no one thought that the first major casualty would be the University of Kansas (KU), the state’s flagship institution.

At an April 2nd press conference, KU Chancellor Doug Girod announced that the University will close permanently at the end of the current academic year.  The reason: the NCAA’s cancellation of the 2020 men’s basketball tournament, which meant that the school’s #1-ranked Jayhawks would not get a chance to win the national championship.

Red-eyed and choked with emotion, Girod spoke without notes:

“Our record was 28 and 3 when the season was stolen from us.  This loss has simply been too much for our community to bear.  In Kansas, college basketball is all we have.  We’ve got no Major League baseball team, no NFL team, no NBA team, no NHL team.  Nothing!  If it weren’t for Dorothy saying ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto’ in The Wizard of Oz, nobody would know our state even exists.

“We offered all of our players substantial financial incentives, siphoned from the budget of KU’s Office of Gender Equity, to come back next year, but as a group they have decided to enter the NBA draft.  Without them, who knows when we would be good enough to return to the Final Four?  Perhaps never.

“Our student body is bereft.  They live for March Madness.  KU’s Counseling Center is seeing a record number of cases of self-flagellation.  Some students have even tried to take their own lives by attaching themselves to basketballs with duct tape and jumping into nearby Clinton Lake, not realizing that the balls would keep them afloat rather than sink them.  Now their humiliation is total. 

“At an all-campus assembly immediately following the cancellation of the tournament, I tried to remind everyone that what’s important in life is the journey, not the destination, and that they should focus on the team’s glorious trip to 28 and 3.  Students and faculty responded by screaming ‘BULLSHIT!’

“I have to admit, I agree with them.  I feel so, so empty.  At this point, I think I can best fulfill my role as Chancellor by shepherding our beloved institution into the hereafter with dignity.  There are plenty of other schools in Kansas where students can get a………can get a………actually, let me get back to you on that. 

“Soar toward the light, Jayhawks, soar toward the light!”

Plans to transform the KU campus into an Amazon Fulfillment Center are pending.  Tenured full professors will be given preference when hiring begins.