by Con Chapman
Lifestyles Editor

Two cups of prestige, one cup of condescension, water, baking soda, turmeric and salt and pepper to taste.

SEEKONK, Mass. It is an age-old complaint, going back to the first modern university in Bologna, Italy, where administrators rebuffed a demand for higher pay in 1090 A.D. by telling staff they should be thankful they worked at the most prestigious—in fact the only—institution of its kind in the world.

“Bologna!” said Anfelisia Piuoli, a scrivener who worked in the office of the Dean of Astrology. “You can’t eat prestige!”

But that continuing source of tension between college administrators and staff may go the way of freshman beanies if experiments performed in the culinary arts lab at UMass-Seekonk can be replicated elsewhere. “We have succeeded in making prestige edible,” says Dr. Scott Nowak as he pulls a white lab rat away from a feeder bottle. “And I’m pleased to report that it is just as palatable as the food we serve in the dorms.”

The recipe for the concoction, which is available for commercial exploitation through the school’s technology licensing office, calls for two cups of prestige, one cup of condescension, water, baking soda, turmeric and salt and pepper to taste. The final product has the color and consistency of mashed potatoes, making it easy to experiment on a blind basis with staff who buy their lunch in the school’s common cafeteria.

Linda McIlvaine, a long-time secretary in the admissions office who has been grumbling about the salaries paid to the school’s basketball coach and some of his players, sits down with Dianne Wurzel, a receptionist in the law school’s placement office who frequently tosses résumés away out of bitterness at the high starting salaries young attorneys are paid.

“So I says to him I says,” Wurzel is saying to McIlvaine as she tucks into meat loaf and what she believes to be mashed potatoes, “you should be thankful I even put you on the list for that interview, you little twerp.”

McIlvaine nods in agreement as she unknowingly eats a bite of prestige, but before long both women are showing symptoms of a “starch high” that has them thanking their lucky stars they work at the school.

“I dunno,” Wurzel says as she leans back in her folding chair, full and apparently satisfied with her job for the first time in years. “This ain’t such a bad place to work.”

“I know what you mean,” McIlvaine replies. “When I ask myself what are we here for, the answer I always come up with is to produce young men who will go on to make millions in the NBA.”

After the overwhelming success of the University of Texas’s “Ethics Unwrapped” program featuring ex-lobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff, a world tour is being planned for A-list ethics specialists to extoll wisdom to business and political science students.

“Students and faculty at the McCombs School of Business were the perfect test audience for us,” said entertainment agent Artie Cameron, who signed Abramoff as a client as soon as the UT session ended. “MBA students want to hear from someone real – someone who’s been there. They’re sick of goody goodies like the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela being shoved down their throats. I’m sure they’re nice guys, but let’s be honest – they’ve never faced the tough dilemmas of the corporate world.”

Teaming with Abramoff for the “Pay to Play” tour are former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and former U.S. Senator John Edwards.

“Ideally, Rod and John will both speak live from jail cells, adding to their credibility,” said Cameron. “We’ll use cutting-edge technology to modernize the concept of the ‘speaker tour.’ After Pay to Play live, in-person ethics speakers will forever be judged as boring poseurs. How can you believe someone stands for strong ethics if he he hasn’t done hard time?”

by Veronica Zolter
Staff Writer

Dreamy Oaks will pilot its Robo-Campus Police program next fall. A final decision about whether the robots will carry guns is expected soon.

Fueled by a recent study showing that robo-graders’ test scoring ability rivals those provided by armies of angry adjuncts, the College of Dreamy Oaks has decided to launch its new freshman English program this fall, virtually people-free.

You read right. Or was that “you read right?” Past or present tense and such minor details won’t matter much any more. Unless the robots say so. The department of Robo-Rhetoric will feature one snappy new robot for each 25 freshmen, bringing artificial intelligence to the bright and shiny forefront at Dreamy Oaks.

“We are not just waiting for a brave new world, we are creating one,” said English department chair, Vinny Toro, the first ever to eliminate an entire department of people in favor of robots. “We don’t need to bring them coffee and donuts at our annual back-to-school boot camp. We will just carry Windex and a recharger.”

President Jonathan Jones, whose salary has increased precisely the amount gained by the firing of the entire Freshman English staff, applauds Toro’s innovative approach. “Robo-readers can do anything teachers did. Except drive from campus to campus. And organize. And write op-eds to try to shame us. Instead, our robots will be full-fledged members of the faculty. They will spit out assignments. They will grade them. They will even have their heads turn in complete 360 degree circles saying ‘warning! warning!’ when students text in class. I have never met a teacher able to do that. We have already ordered 40. Who knows? The department of Robo-Education or Robo-Finance may be next.”

The I.T. department did not wish to dampen the optimism of President Jones or Dr. Toro, but was a bit guarded in its assessment of the plans, especially since they were not consulted before a hefty campus check to the Intergalactic Takeover Institute was dropped off at an obscure post office box in a distant state.

“We will do our best to keep the robots in working order,” said Jane Jabber, I.T. manager. “We will put our best student assistants right on it as they really have a way with newfangled equipment. The rest of us will focus on inconspicuousness. We wouldn’t want to take attention from the president’s new baby, of course.”

High school valedictorian Anson Qwerty was recruited to Dreamy Oaks and plans to hack the robo-system over the summer, showing his superior I.T. skills. “No, I’m just kidding with you,” he said. “What I really hope to do is build a clone programmed to gloss over plagiarized papers. I’ll market it to students across the globe.”

by Con Chapman
Lifestyles Editor

A note to our readers: When we published Con Chapman's story this week, several dozen of you spoke out in outrage and disappointment that The Cronk had published an article that did not conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us. We met and decided to encourage you to debate the points he raises in his story in the spirit of higher thinking. In a few days we'll give up our hopes that intellectuals can be humanists, too, and invite you to his stoning.

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. Curtis Bascomb is head of information technology of The Cronk of Higher Education, but he says he’ll be looking for a new job following a weekend when he was on call 24/7. “They don’t pay me enough to give a crap as it is,” he says as he coils wire around his arm like a rock group roadie. “If I have to give up my hobby of Spanish-American War re-enactment I’m outta here.”

The cause of the crisis that crashed the on-line magazine’s servers was a column by blogger Lisa Tilden attacking the work produced by candidates for advanced degrees in the nation’s Freedonian Studies departments, which ended with a facetious call for universities to divert scarce resources currently spent on such programs to Friday night keg parties. “We would be better off producing graduates who are unemployable because they are drunk, not drunk because they are unemployable,” she wrote.

Tilden quoted from a number of dissertations in the field to make her point, including “Who’s Your Nanny: An Examination of Goat-Human Eroticism in 19^th Century Freedonian Vers Libre” by Dos Fledens-Gzodny, a Ph. D. candidate at SUNY-Cazenovia. “My work is as respectable as so much of what is written in other less untraditional departments like Women’s Studies and Sports Management,” he says, clearly agitated. “I spit on the grave of this blogger’s mother, this is how bad I am thinking of her.”

Freedonia was formed after World War II from portions of Albania, Serbia and New Jersey, along with a boxcar of instant mashed potatoes that spoiled before it could be served to liberating U.S. troops. A Freedonian diaspora followed a brief but intense civil war between rival ethnic groups, the Large and Small Curds, which U.N. peacekeepers were unable to prevent due to bribes paid in zlotniks, the nation’s unwieldy currency whose coins are as large as manhole covers.

Tilden says she expects to be fired, but for now is on unpaid leave while Cronk’s Board of Academic Advisors determines whether she violated the publication’s Standards of Civility. “It’s not like they were paying me before so I can’t complain too much,” she says. “On the other hand, every footnote in that post adhered strictly to the Chicago Manual of Style.”

Freedonians are sometimes referred to as America’s most neglected minority, always by members of the ethnic group itself. How, this reporter asks Fledens-Gzodny, can he be offended at verbal slights that are directed at him as a member of a fictional if vibrant culture. “I hear your words,” he says defiantly. “What’s your point?”

Move-Out Bingo. Play along!

Move-out Bingo
We see a lot of strange things on move-in day..and we’re glad to see them go on move-out day. Be sure to check off the spaces to win*.

*There’s no prize. The prize is an empty residence hall.

by A.J. Marshfield, Staff Writer