University Life

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled “Tips on Making the Most of Your College’s Location” shared suggestions for how “a college situated in a seemingly less-than-ideal place could appeal to students.”  A useful piece, to be sure, but it omitted some compelling examples of doing the most with the least.  Here are two stories that deserve greater attention:

Wetlands Community College (Everglades City, Florida) — There are more alligators in Everglades City than there are people, and the single most frequent cause of death in this community is being eaten by an alligator while walking or driving.  “These gators are smart,” observes Gary ‘Sweetwater’ Wench, Everglade City’s sheriff.  “They hide in the back seat of your vehicle and when you stop for a red light — Whammo! — one chomp and it’s over.  Plastic-covered car seats are a must in our town if you want to avoid replacing upholstery every three months!”

For years this constant threat of sudden death suppressed enrollment at Wetlands, until Bix Slawson became Dean of Admissions in 2014.  Slawson decided to revamp the institution’s recruitment materials to focus on the allure that risk and danger have for teenage males.  “We introduced our new branding slogan, ‘Live on the Edge at Wetlands’, in 2015, and haven’t looked back.  Our incoming class has grown from 283 in 2014 to 890 in Fall 2017.  The first-year gender breakdown has shifted from 56% female to 89% male during that period.  And our newly established Russian Roulette team won the NCAA Regional Finals last year.”

Slawson acknowledges that “we do have a retention problem, of course, because of the gators and the high number of students who try out for the Roulette squad.   But those who survive frequently go on to serve with distinction in elite units of the military.  Most Navy SEALs are Wetlands graduates.  We’re very proud of that.”

Carlsbad University (Carlsbad, New Mexico) — The city of Carlsbad is located about 25 miles from a nuclear waste repository.  “Radioactivity makes people jumpy,” says Dale Janway, the town’s mayor.  “And I mean that literally.  When radioactive material is absorbed through your skin, it affects the nerves associated with limb movement.  Just walk down Main Street in Carlsbad and you’ll notice people’s bodies jerking all around like they’re marionettes controlled by a crack addict.  It’s the damnedest thing you’ll ever see.  Naturally, this used to alienate high school students who might otherwise come here for college.”

Not any more.

In 2013, Swaseen Mushkentaya arrived at the University to chair its Performing Arts Department.  She soon recognized that the spasms produced by radioactive poisoning closely resemble much of the oeuvre of modern dance.  “It’s all there,” Mushkentaya claims. “The choreography of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp.  It’s as if the city’s public spaces were one huge rehearsal studio.”

Mushkentaya realized that combining toxic levels of radioactivity with dance instruction was a win-win for the school and the community.  She initiated a master’s program in Modern Dance that has attracted students from all over the country, and her latest work, Mutant Twitcher with Three Heads, will premiere this summer at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts. 

“Our enrollment has mushroomed over the past three years,” Mushkentaya boasts.  “Oops, did I make a bad joke?”

Moral of Story: Stop complaining that your school sits atop a live volcano, and start turning negatives into positives.  Wetlands did it, Carlsbad did it, and so can you.

 

It’s not often that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) injects itself into political controversies relevant to college campuses, but 2017 has not been an ordinary year.  So perhaps it is not surprising that the agency has announced that it is reclaiming the word “snowflake” for its exclusive use.

In a December 21st press conference held at NOAA’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, Chief Administrator Timothy Gallaudet noted that in the past few years the term “snowflake” has been “hijacked by conservative activists and re-purposed in a derogatory fashion to describe an overly sensitive or easily offended college student.  This is an abuse of a word that depicts one of nature’s most stunning creations, an intricate, wondrous, symmetrical ice crystal that gently descends through the Earth’s atmosphere.  Dragging ‘snowflake’ into the polarizing discourse of our nation’s current political battles is simply unacceptable.  STOP IT.”

Doctor Gallaudet suggested that the term “whine-puppy” be used instead of “snowflake” to refer to the population in question, a recommendation that was immediately objected to by representatives of DUPE: Dogs United to Pee Everywhere.

Happy Holidays to All from University Life!

The University of Maryland made headlines recently when it decided to hire a full-time “Hate-Bias Response Coordinator” (no joke).  According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the coordinator “will manage a new bias-response team, as well as meet with students affected by hate incidents and help design training and education on diversity and inclusion issues.”

Sounds pretty good in theory, but it looks like the details are revealing a devil or two.

For example, consider Sage Grouse College in Casper, Wyoming.  In early November it hired its first HBR Coordinator.  Just in time, it seemed, because less than two weeks later a flood of vile, hostile graffiti targeting natives of Liechtenstein began appearing throughout the campus (e.g., “Likdenstein is the 4th smallest country in Europe, and it SUCKS.”)  The country’s flag (see above) was found stuffed in a toilet in The Bird’s Nest, Sage Grouse’s main student cafeteria, causing the facility to flood. 

Shockingly, campus police traced the crimes to Quentin Skoof, the school’s HBR Coordinator.  According to a statement released by the college, “Mr. Skoof was deeply concerned that there would too few hate incidents on Sage Grouse’s demographically homogeneous campus to justify his continued employment in the Coordinator position, so he decided to manufacture incidents on his own.  Given that no students from Liechtenstein attend Sage Grouse, Mr. Skoof thought that no one would be harmed by focusing on this group.  As it turns out, the grandparents of the custodian who discovered the flag in the toilet were raised in Liechtenstein.  The custodian is now being treated by a therapist from our Flag Abuse Crisis Team (FACT).”

Mr. Skoof has been formally reprimanded for his actions, and will be required to attend a remedial vocabulary class where the proper spelling of “Liechtenstein” will be addressed. 

On a more positive note, the percentage of Sage Grouse students who correctly identify Liechtenstein as a country in Europe, not a sex position, has increased from 15% to 43% since the graffiti incident.

 

Campus Reform, a politically conservative website devoted to higher education, has ignited a firestorm of controversy with its recent claim that chair desks for left-handed students are significantly over-represented in college classrooms around the country.  According to Sterling Beard, Campus Reform’s editor, left-handers constitute only about 10% of the student population, but nearly 17% of all college chair desks are designed for this subgroup.  “What we have here is discrimination, pure and simple,” Beard asserts.  “Many right-handed students are being not-so-subtly encouraged to take notes with their left hand, which subconsciously facilitates the sort of socialist thinking that supports abortion-on-demand and Michael Moore documentaries.”

Not surprisingly, skewed chair-desk ratios are most likely to be found in small liberal-arts colleges in New England such as Amherst, Middlebury, and Bowdoin, where even the math classes typically begin with an inspirational reading from Trotsky.

“This array of furniture represents a daily ergonomic micro-aggression against conservative students, and it must stop,” Beard demands.  “We are now hearing reports of outbreaks of ‘trans-handedness’ on campuses throughout the United States.  Many young people who were born biologically right-handed now actually prefer to take notes with their left hand.  Some have ceased using their right hand when typing on their laptop, and are insisting that Obamacare pay for the surgical removal of that hand.  At Colby College they’re even lobbying for ‘hand-neutral’ bathrooms.  This is insane!”

Campus Reform will sponsor Burn, Baby, Burn, a classroom furniture bonfire, on the quadrangle at Williams College in February 2018.    

“Should Laptops Be Banned in Class?”  That’s the incendiary question posed in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  With a ferocity that evokes images of battlefield carnage at Antietam and Gettysburg, faculty and students on campuses around the country are engaged in a steel-cage death match to determine who controls the classroom in 2017.  Professors want students’ undivided attention, while students relish their constitutionally protected freedom to roam the Internet and monitor friends’ breakfast choices, explore the influence of Heidegger and Kierkegaard on Taylor Swift song lyrics, watch SportsCenter updates on the arrest records of bowl-eligible college football teams, and keep tabs on the daily breastfeeding schedule of Beyoncé’s twins. 

Neither side wants to give ground.  Some faculty attempt to ban laptops in their classrooms, but resourceful students respond by hiding smartphones between their thighs, staring at their crotches during class in a fashion that brings to mind Louis C. K. fiddling with his Sears Craftsman Tool Box while auditioning potential cast members in his office.

Is there a way out of these killing fields?  Absolutely, according to officials at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  University spokeswoman Samantha Yertz-Pez proclaims that “we have taken hold of this Rubik’s Cube of a problem, broken it down, and then combined it with another problem to fashion an elegant solution.”

Here’s how they did it, according to Yertz-Pez:

“First, it’s important to recognize that most students don’t pay attention in class, regardless of whether they are using a laptop or not.

“Second, the Internet information these students currently scan on their laptops is pretty much pure crap.  The challenge we face is to give them something meaningful to do in class with those machines.

“Third, due to state budget cuts, we no longer have sufficient staff to carry out much of the computer-based work of the University.  For example, we desperately need people to enter grade changes into our data base for students who are unhappy with their GPAs and want their transcripts altered.  And Health Services must update students’ medical records on a weekly basis to show the status of the sexually transmitted diseases they are being treated for.  The University’s annual Chlamydia Festival is only two months away!  We just don’t have the personnel required to do the work.

“Here is where students and their laptops come in.  Beginning in January, we are going to give students the option of doing computer-based clerical work while they are in class.  These tasks can be substituted for note-taking and conventional course assignments, and will be graded.  If a student performs at a high level, he or she will also be given a voucher for use at the University’s Medical Marijuana Dispensary.

“This is a win-win situation for everyone.  The University gets essential tasks accomplished, the students get good grades and high-quality weed, and professors no longer have to spend hours preparing content-stuffed lectures that students ignore.  These same faculty can now devote their energies to composing essays for The Nation and The New Republic while using class time to show documentaries that deconstruct the intersectional identities of zoo animals (‘A Cheetah is More than Its Spots’).”

Can undergraduates be trusted to handle the sensitive information about their fellow students contained in administrative records?  “Not a problem,” says Brad Sneft, the University’s legal counsel.  “We have clearly communicated to students that all violations of confidentiality will be severely punished except when we choose not to do so.  There’s no ambiguity about what our position is.”

Well, someone has finally done it.  And, of course, it was Harvard.  On Tuesday, America’s flagship university announced a thorough overhaul of its grading system in an effort to reduce faculty guilt over grade inflation.  According to Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, “for far too long, higher education has been dominated by a paradigm that does not reflect how faculty truly feel about the grades they award.  It’s time for substantive change.  Toward that end, I am proud to share with you the new Harvard University Grading Scale (HUGS).  I hope it exerts a positive influence on the policies of our peer institutions around the country.  Thank you.”

The Scale, presented below, will be implemented in the Fall 2018 semester.

A+   Satisfactory, but less than outstanding

A     You know you’re capable of better

A-    The minus should tell you something: stop skating through life

B+    Unambiguously disappointing

B     Not only disappointing, your work is also boring

B-    Have you no pride?

C+   This is beyond embarrassing

C      Total disaster

C-     You should be beaten

D+    You should be put in prison, and then beaten

D      Don’t have children

D-     Don’t even adopt children

F       Your parents should not have had children

INC  You’ve never committed to anything in your life; why start now?

AUDIT   Whatever.  But seriously, why even bother?

President Faust dismissed rumors that the timing of the HUGS announcement was an attempt by Harvard to retake the high ground among Ivy League institutions after its second consecutive loss to Yale in THE GAME on November 18th.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that “professors at Eastern Michigan University are objecting to its partnership with a private company to market and support online programs, making it the latest institution to grapple with questions about the quality of online instruction.”

While faculty are fighting these battles around the country, as universities increasingly contract with for-profit institutions to develop academically “iffy” enterprises, a small school in Lubbock, Texas has raised the stakes to the next level.  Meerkat University announced last week that it had signed an agreement with Satan in an effort to more aggressively market its online offerings.

Meerkat’s President, Dr. Fenton Swig, noted the risk inherent in such a venture: “Cutting a deal with Satan is not something we do lightly.  We’ve worked with evil online companies before, and yes, their vision statements often amount to, ‘We’d have rhesus monkeys teaching online if we could get them to stop pooping on the keyboard.’  But Satan represents a whole new ballgame of indifference to quality.  Partnering with an entity whose slogan is “By Any Means Necessary” gives us pause.  

“That being said, our tuition-driven business model requires that we cultivate new markets for online education — toddlers, the recently deceased, and ISIS, for example.  Satan has a negative reputation, to be sure, but how much of that reputation is truly deserved?  His biggest sin was to challenge the patriarchal hegemony of God the Father.  In today’s political climate that happens every week in the New York Times Book Review.  Who gets to decide what is evil, anyway?  In a world where the Kardashian family and the creators of Jersey Shore and The Bachelorette have not been sentenced to life imprisonment for committing genocide against popular culture, what’s so bad about enrolling a dozen dementia patients from an assisted living facility in a 3-credit graduate course on The History of Etch-A-Sketch Art Since 1960, taught by a bottlenose dolphin with an associate’s degree from Sea World?  I guarantee you, if we don’t do this, someone else will.”

PS:  For those not familiar with the title of this post, please borrow your parents’ vinyl copy of Beggars Banquet by the Rolling Stones.

 

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.