“Everyone’s saying I made Professor Matthews’ day,” said McNare. “Maybe he’ll consider curving my grade now.”

A haggard Professor Jody Matthews needed a double shot of espresso at the campus Jumping Bein’s Café to make it through his two physics lectures on Wednesday. Matthews spent a sleepless night trying to come up with the perfect comeback to sophomore Nate McNare’s muttered heckling in Tuesday’s lab.

“I’m exhausted,” said Professor Matthews in the faculty lounge, “but I couldn’t rest without an answer.”

“Matty has always been the hardest worker on our team,” said physics adjunct Xi Yan. “When he told me about his quest for the perfect comeback I knew he’d find something good, but he really outdid himself.”

“He had the perfect tone, perfect elocution and the finest wording I’ve ever heard,” said shaken physics C- student Webber Harris. “I’ve inspired a lot of comebacks in my career, but Professor Matthews reset the bar. He humiliated the kid and terrified everyone who’s heard about it since.”

“I wish I could take credit for it,” said Matthews. “After all that agonizing, the answer came to me when I finally gave up. It’s almost like it wrote itself. Now that I’ve heard what a chilling message I sent to not just that student but every student in the world, I’m humbled. I really made a difference. I’m making the world better.”

“Perfect comeback? Yesterday?” said McNare, the student at which the comeback was aimed. “I guess he said something that made people go bananas. I wasn’t paying much attention.”

by Diana Senechal

Professor Blankenship will no doubt face harsh criticism for his antiquated use of written formulas and engaging lectures.

Pebble Heights, IL—In response to recent rumors, Pustoy College has sent out a flurry of press releases vehemently denying that its faculty engage in instruction. “Pustoy College is a 21^st century institution,” one of them reads, “and as such, it would never besmirch its reputation by having a professor stand in front of the students and deliver an antiquated lesson.”

“Besmirch, ha!” a bystander snorted. “No one in the 21^st century says ‘besmirch.’”

“As a progressive, forward-looking institution of higher learning, we have removed all vestiges of tradition,” the press release continues. (“Vestiges!” the bystander jeered.) “Our faculty know that their mission is not to teach, but to empower. Their place is not at the front of the room; in fact, they have no place at all. They move hither and thither in the spirit of circulation.” Here the press release pauses for air. (“Hither and thither? Oh please!” the bystander guffawed.)

Clearing its throat with a new paragraph, the press release resumes its apology (in the old sense of the word). “In the past, we may have had a faculty member who clung passionately to old ways; however, our recent classroom renovations render such clinging obsolete. There is no blackboard or whiteboard whatsoever; instead, projectors and screens adorn the four corners of the room, and the students face all four directions. A teacher who stands still for more than five seconds receives a mild electric shock and an automated email reprimand. In addition, we have video cameras in all rooms so that we may judge instructional minutiae at our pleasure. In over a thousand snapshots, we have not seen a trace of teaching. The so-called ‘teaching scandal,’ concocted, no doubt, by competitor colleges, has no foundation in reality.”

An anonymous professor told us that she had started holding classes in a nearby park so that she could teach them her subject, which actually did require coherent exposition. “My students appreciate this so much that they don’t even mind getting rained on,” she said. “When the weather gets cold, we’ll have to take it somewhere else. Maybe the local diner.”

“Whoever this professor is, she’s just fighting the current,” a college spokesman responded. “You can run from your boss. You can even run from yourself. But you can’t run from the times, especially these times.”

Students have been circulating an underground petition to restore instruction. “We do not disparage innovative teaching,” the petition reads, “but innovation is folly when it rejects the good of the past and present. There is much good in listening to a professor. It does not impede thought. To the contrary; it can stimulate it.”

“We’ll get those kids literally singing to a different tune,” responded President Ahora Teper. “We plan to hold daily pep rallies. Also, once the RFID-enhanced badges arrive, we’ll be able to put a stop to all covert activity. We’re branding ourselves as a school of the future, and we’re not going to let a fabricated scandal harm our brand. Just to satisfy reporters like you, we’ll conduct a full-scale investigation, and then we’ll put this all to rest. We just have one problem.” She fell silent and sank into a sigh.

We asked what that might be. “Well, our press writer happens to love Victorian literature,” she confessed. “We really need a modern-minded writer, but a lot of the modern-minded people can’t write. So, in the meantime, until we find that perfect candidate, we’ll have to put up with words like ‘besmirch.’ It’s a small concession, though, when you consider the whole picture.”

by Con Chapman
Lifestyles Editor

CHILLICOTHE, Ohio. Four decades ago Melissa Morton’s mother Marilyn taped a peace sign to her mortarboard on graduation day at Waldmore University, a small gesture that was part of a larger wave of activism as students became commencement speakers for the first time. “We were rebels but we wanted to keep tradition,” Marilyn says as she wistfully recalls those days. “What we got was Todd Krimke, an insufferable pre-law major, but that wasn’t our fault.”

With that battle fought and won long ago, today’s graduates are taking on another fortress of resistance at baccalaureate services: the presentation of awards funded long ago by alums that have lost relevance to students of today.

“We have the Claude W. Schukter Award for the best essay on Ohio history,” says Ted Kaye a political science major. “Excuse my French—which I got a B- in, by the way—but who gives a flying (expletive) at a rolling donut?”

So student leaders from both the University’s “official” and “counter-culture” wings convened to re-write the rules on the activities they wanted recognized for having improved the quality of campus life over the past four years. “The Clovis Gomes Award awarded to the most proficient student in Greek is all Greek to these kids,” says Assistant Dean Horace Markey. “I mean, who speaks Greek anymore after rush week?”

The list of honors to be awarded next Sunday afternoon here reads like a Baedeker’s guide through the interests of college-age youth today, including the following:

The Hadley “Jake” Withers Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Party-Planning:
“Jake was a real inspiration to his classmates,” says Assistant Dean Markey as he reads from a 4” x 6” note card he will use to jog his memory at the podium. “He consistently provided his parents’ credit card to pay the deposit on beer kegs, a common oversight that slowed the alcohol consumption of fraternities other than his.”

The Adele Newkirk Award for Peremptory Rejections by a College Literary Rag Editor:
“Adele Newkirk was a poetess who tragically did not graduate with her fellow members of the Class of ’74,” says Dean of Women Sophie Grealey. “She died from massive bleeding after tearing her hair out reading submissions to throttled passions, our student poetry quarterly.” The award will go to Bethany Kripke, who added “poems about John Coltrane” to the list of grounds for automatic rejection, which had previously been limited to poems about rainbows and sea gulls.

The William Neasmith Award for Illegal Drug Concealment:
“Willie Neasmith devised some of the more creative pot-hiding techniques of the sixties,” notes Student Government President Wayne Grillig. This year’s recipient is Blair Henderson, who perfected the ‘smelly sock’ stratagem. “Blair made a huge difference in dorm life,” says Cabot Henry III, a classmate. “His socks were so nasty no police dog or dean of students would dare to sniff them.”

It’s time to submit your final grades, shoo those students out of their rooms and enter the third annual CronkNews online summer book club, hosted by Cronk head writer emeritus Irma Pelt.

How does it work?

1. 

   Daring Greatly by Brené Brown

   Get the book. This year’s selection is Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown.

As Sir Ken Robinson said in his review, “One of the tragic ironies of modern life is that so many people feel isolated from each other by the very feelings they have in common: including a fear of failure and a sense of not being enough. Brené Brown shines a bright light into these dark recesses of human emotion and reveals how these feelings can gnaw at fulfillment in education, at work and in the home. She shows too how they can be transformed to help us live more wholehearted lives of courage, engagement and purpose. Brené Brown writes as she speaks, with wisdom, wit, candor and a deep sense of humanity. If you’re a student, teacher, parent, employer, employee or just alive and wanting to live more fully, you should read this book. I double dare you.”

2. Get a twitter account and follow the hashtag #CronkClub. Need a quick lesson on Twitter hashtags (that funny little # symbol)? Click here.

3. Follow facilitator Irma Pelt who will post questions. We will all join the conversation from there.

The fun begins Thursday June 27 at 9:00 p.m. EST.

by Con Chapman
Lifestyle Editor

“My allowance pays almost as much as my [French Poetry major] sister’s salary,” said kindergartener Wally Norfred. “She may be book-smart, but I have street cred.”

Still, he’s not sure he wants to follow in the footsteps of an English major who only received one job offer, a temporary minimum wage position reviewing mortgage documents for typos and punctuation errors that could undermine a bank’s rights. “They’re paying him $7.35 an hour,” Timmy says with apparent disgust. “I can make that much mowing lawns.”

So Timmy and his friend Scott Rouchka are taking a long, hard look at whether it makes more sense for them to cut their losses now before they invest precious time and effort in sixth grade, which has historically been viewed as the gateway to seventh grade and eventually a college degree.

“Sixth grade math is a BIG jump,” says Rouchka, who was fifth-grade arm-wrestling champion. “There’s fractions and decimals, which computers already know how to do.”

The two boys’ skepticism represents a worrisome sign for college admissions officers, who already struggle to keep male-female ratios in balance in order to avoid the “loathsome cad” effect; women now make up 57% of college students, and male students are emboldened to treat their distaff counterparts badly as the imbalance between their range of possible dating and mating prospects widens over those of coeds.

“I blame college dropout billionaires like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell,” says Dean Claus Ornstein of Glendon College in Normal, Illinois before this reporter interrupts him. “I could go on,” he says, but agrees to cut his list of examples short due to editorial restrictions.

A bachelor’s degree is still viewed as an essential credential for most white-collar jobs by many adults, but Timmy Salmon says times have changed. “When I told the recruitment chair of the Tri Delts that I made enough money last summer to buy a bike and a baseball glove her eyes got REAL wide and she said ‘Wow!’” he recalls. “I’m pretty sure I could have kissed her but they had those pigs-in-a-blanket mini-hot dogs that I love and I didn’t want to leave the buffet.”

Big brother Tom says he thinks Timmy is wrong and that there is value to be gained by exposure to the humanities early in life. “When I smoked pot in high school I was totally clueless,” he recalls. “Now our drug-addled bullshit sessions are really deep.”