The Students’ Headquarters of McGall University (SHMU) held its semesterly General Assembly (GA), known colloquially as the “quorum love-in,” last Wednesday. The GA offered a chance to discuss the pressing political issues on campus, but students were spared a lengthy debate in the name of free speech; organizers were reportedly disappointed to discover that human nature is fundamentally petty.
After hours of waiting, hundreds of students crowded the Shtaneer building, frothing at the bit to debate minor points of policy. Paramedics were called to attend to several undergraduate students overcome with overpowering waves of emotion upon hearing the good word of Robert’s Rules or Order.
“Have you read the Robert’s Rules book?”
Motion to be a little kind sometimes, maybe
The lion’s share of students were motivated to attend the “quorum love-in” because of one single motion – one proposing that SHMU timidly condemn a combination of open-air prisons, targeted death-from-the-sky attacks, and grinding daily humiliation and poverty for a certain national group.
However, opinion among McGall’s undergraduate student body toward the motion was mixed. “This motion is completely inappropriate,” explained Major Rand Trilby, a U2 Objective History student. “I’ve read a fair bit of history in my time, much of it objective, and I’ve learned that history belongs to the strong. How dare SHMU try to buck the trend. Crush the weak!” he exclaimed.
Many apparently failed to grasp that McGall manufactured weaponry is used to oppress the group mentioned in the motion in the university’s “Murder Innocent People” laboratory.
“I can understand one fact,” garbled Luke Reject, an undergraduate researcher at the Department of Brain Thinky Science. “But two facts! And make a causal connection?” he asked, shocked. “This is McGall, not Harvard.”
“I’ve read a fair bit of history in my time, much of it objective, and I’ve learned that history belongs to the strong. How dare SHMU try to buck the trend. Crush the weak!”
Rumours that SHMU had been strong-armed into proposing the motion by campus totalitarians also ran rampant in the days leading up to the GA – to the extent that liberty and free speech activists quickly organized to prevent a campus dictatorship.
“The idea that SHMU, which must represent me, would force us all to say that murder is wrong beggars belief,” said a disgruntled McGall student who asked to remain anonymous. “How can we hold a debate on an issue in which I’m clearly in the global minority?” the student continued. “It’s outrageous. Freedom of speech for everyone means freedom of speech for me, which logically entails freedom of speech for only me.”
One student was so struck by the prospect of left-wing totalitarian rule that he became a dedicated disciple of Robert’s Rules in the hope of communing directly with Robert himself. To the good luck of free speech activists, the student was eventually graced with Robert’s presence.
“It was tough,” the Anointed One told The Weekly, “To become a true disciple requires total dedication. It is a multifaceted task: for example, I had to train myself to speak in such a way as to make everyone before me fall asleep in stultifying boredom.”
“After a week of mental and physical trials, I communed with the Great Robert,” the Anointed One continued. “He taught me his ways – and they were good.”
When it came to debate the motion, the Anointed One stepped up to the podium and stunned the audience with the gift of his learning, the “subsidiary motion to postpone indefinitely.”
“That was Robert’s Rules: Boss Level,” Trilby told The Weekly in an email.
“That was Robert’s Rules: Boss Level,” Trilby told The Weekly in an email.
Such was the brilliance of the Anointed One, that all antagonists relented, admitting that free speech did indeed trump morals. Afterward, the debate attendees fell into a trance of adoring reverie, giving real meaning to the “quorum love-in.”
Students and SHMU executives were so ecstatic to be touched from on high that they missed a Skype call from Raul Castro and Kim Jong-Un congratulating them on their democratic practices.