“It does not escape our notice that the North American higher education system is constructed to cater to one very specific type of mind, housed in one very specific type of body. It is not the goal of my position to change that,” Behapie said with a chuckle. “I mean, could you imagine? But we feel we’ve made a few useful tweaks to that model, making McGall a veritable wonderland for the neurodetergent. Neurodeterrent. Whatever. The neurowhatevers among us. Them.”

“We just feel so lucky that we have a small number of wonderful, incredibly overburdened staff members dedicated to taking care of these students. So convenient. Takes the onus off of everyone else! So they can go about their normal business, without having to think about this type of thing too hard.”

Despite the narrow timeframe dedicated to this conference, the reporters present managed to pose plenty of insightful questions, regarding things like the staffing problems in the Office that does nothing for Students with Disabilities, the difficulty of communication within the University’s heavily divided department structure, and even the very nature of McGall’s red-tape-laden bureaucracy and the time and energy necessary to navigate student services. Behapie, serene and cheerful as always, dismissed these concerns with a wave of one pale, spidery hand.

“Learning to navigate within these structures builds character these students might not develop otherwise. What is this, Tumblr? We can’t coddle them!”

“Still, in recognition of the difficulties faced by these, ahem, difficult cases, we’ve elected to hire cute, perky yoga teachers-in-training to sit at strategic points throughout the campus, ready at any moment to suggest meditation as a cure for depression, or a juice cleanse to combat anxiety. But listening to these brave new employees is the responsibility of the students! If they would just take the good advice that’s offered, their lives could be so much easier!” With this, Behapie crossed his arms, leaned comfortably back on the podium, and nodded to himself contentedly, looking not unlike a farmer surveying a particularly fruitful harvest.

“We just want to do everything we can to help these students decide to be normal and stop bothering everyone. It’s not easy, Lord knows they don’t make it easy for us, but we’re doing our best. And that’s what’s important, isn’t it?”

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In the wee hours of this past Thursday morning, it was reported that McGall Weekly contributor and U3 Bullshit Semiotics major Mathilda Cesarina Quimms died of mysterious causes in her apartment. Experts expect someone will get around to caring by Wednesday? Thursday maybe? They dunno, dude, there are a lot of midterms this week, stop being such a drama queen. Suspected cause of death is suffocation via a crushing Sisyphian weight comprised of the workload associated with earning an undergraduate Arts degree and the accompanying quiet terror of knowing said work may not, in fact, be a simple stumbling block on the road to immortal fame and renown.

Quimms was also beginning to doubt her long-held belief that her body held the reincarnated souls of both Dorothy Parker and Catherine de Medici, a state far from optimal for one such as herself, who survived entirely on a diet of cosmic narcissism and sometimes Kraft dinner.

The Weekly was lucky enough to grab a word with Quimms on her way up to the Dark Door in the Sky. Banging together a couple of soda cans in lieu of rattling chains, the deceased was luminous with the glowing radiant clarity of the Great Beyond. The effect may have been enhanced if she’d had a chance to get an old-fashioned white nightgown or something, but the subject was in a hurry and we must be forgiving.

“It just really saddens me that such an important body of work as the one I produced is just going to be lost in the slipstream of time, you know? Remember that one time I wrote an exposé on those two students in the History department? Who were, like, being assholes? That was some hard-hitting shit right there. I mean, people didn’t really talk or tweet about it, but I could feel a sort of shift on campus, you know? People were awake. In a way they hadn’t been before. I did that.”

Quimms declined further comment after this dubious statement, disposed of her soda cans, and continued her journey upwards into the unknowable. She intends to keep her Twitter feed active via photoplasmic patch through the Veil of Worlds.

If the living Quimms is remembered at all, it will probably be for that time that she and her spoken word poetry/noise rock collective got the Battle of the Bands banned from her former high school. Not, like, for her vast, devouring heart, or piercing, unclouded gaze, or relentless hunger for, and pursuit of justice and poetic irony. Because apparently that would be asking too much of the universe (although admittedly that Battle of the Bands was pretty sweet).

Though not asked to offer an example of the wisdom earned in her shuffle off the mortal coil, Quimms enthusiastically submitted that there is, indeed, life after love, only for those “strong enough” to serve at the pleasure of the Great Antenna’d Woman in Black.

If the old maxim states that “the eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator,” one must wonder just how dispassionate we must appear before Ms. Quimms’ tongue begins to slow, even beyond the grave.

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We are well aware that there have been criticisms of our Beloved Father Frood’s oeuvre for almost as long as his work has been available to the psychiatric establishment and the wider world. We allow this. Hell, we created some of it in the beginning, for the sake of plausibility. But these days, it seems like fewer and fewer of your intellectual types are acknowledging Frood’s work as valid in the realms of psychology and even literary analysis. It is, frankly, hurtful.

Look, we know that it seems a little far-fetched to you, but where’s the harm in sticking to a grand tradition of wrongheadedness? Besides, who’s to say that everything isn’t about sex? Come on, everyone thinks about sex all the time, right? Isn’t that what humans do? I mean, Grady’s niece tried to tell him about something called “asexuality,” but we don’t really buy it. Seems unnatural. Kinda alien, you know? And we don’t trust aliens. The basic tenets of Frood’s philosophy still reflect and interpret key aspects of our society as well as the human condition: everyone wants to fuck their mom, penises are inherently male and also everyone wants one, something about the subconscious and dreams (or was that Jung? Whatever, not important). The tenets are durable and useful. Why fix what ain’t broke?

Our experts report that if an object is longer than it is wide, it does, in fact, represent a penis. There is no use arguing with this assertion. To do so would only be indicative of an unspoken desire to have sex with your childhood pet or some shit like that.

Can we get real for a second, kids? Can we rap with you? Can we turn our ball caps to the back and straddle a chair at the front of this funky-fresh classroom in which we’re currently imagining ourselves, like a hip new teacher laying down some knowledge for his ignorant-but-adorable charges? We don’t really buy this stuff either. Not all of it, anyway. But what’s the alternative? The obliteration of cissexism? Decolonization of non-Western gender identities?

It’s just that these days, it seems like things are just changing way too fast. We did manage to get NASA off of all fast-tracked space travel nonsense, and we made a mockery of terraforming and casual interplanetary travel by putting it in the mouths of American Republicans during the last election, but is it enough?

If we can just manage to keep destructive Western society focused on cis men (real men, as we like to call them) and their penises for a few more decades, we may be able to ensure stymied development for the entire planet! We do this to ensure that humanity never reaches the exalted stage of gender enlightenment required for entry into the Intergalactic Society for Peaceful Interplanetary Interface. Because seriously? Fuck aliens.

So, come on, guys. What do you really care about? The safety of the human race? Or extraterrestrials and a nuanced understanding of the social construct that is gender?

Cordially,
The Society for the Perpetuation of LEPIS NEUT

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“I just don’t know what to think of my department’s direction,” Trilby says, squinting out over the railing. He sighs, removing his round-framed glasses and polishing them clean on a handkerchief from the pocket of his black pea coat. “I’m just sick of this lack of confidence in modern history, you know?” When asked to clarify, Trilby cites his recent homework assignment, Emmanuelle de Savoie’s Li-Brie-té, Égalité, Fraternité: Cheese Production and the French Revolution, a book whose author made frequent use of such phrases as “it is believed” and “some evidence suggests” to modify her historical claims.

“I found my trust in the author completely compromised. I need to be taken confidently into the past. What is she trying to accomplish by questioning herself at every turn? What is she trying to convey to the reader?”

“If the writer doesn’t believe his words, how am I supposed to?” Rand makes careful eye contact with your humble McGall Weekly correspondent as he says this, plainly striving to endow his statement with the deliberate self-assurance he sees as lacking in his chosen field of study.

Trilby stares out over the ledge once again, scratching thoughtfully at a constellation of short, scrubby hairs upon his chin that might politely have been called a beard, were he seven years younger. He believes that de Savoie’s style of “wishy-washy” writing is only a symptom of larger problems within the field of history, many of which he has been tracking for nigh-on two years. He bemoans a fractured, impotent discipline with no focus, no thrust, no energy. Some of his ideas meet with approval, especially those that involve confident statements of fact – birth and marriage rates, publication dates, et cetera. But too often he feels pressured to apply one of several ideologies (he says this word the way most people say “cockroach”) to said facts and figures, which he feels is an affront to his carefully neutral viewpoint. What use is Marxism or queer theory, even the very concept of intersectionality, to one so triumphantly objective?

“It’s like they’re trying to make us all feminists or something. And there’s always someone who tries to bring race into things…” Rand heaves a sigh, heavy with the weight of rational detachment. “Stuff like that just makes things complicated.”

Rand smiles to himself, as if at a private joke. “This is beside the point, but I also found de Savoie’s prose a tad too meandering. That didn’t do anything to earn my support. Is it too much to ask that we all own a copy of Strunk and White? Read a little Hemingway, maybe? No one reads Hemingway these days.”

“I shouldn’t have even come to university,” he continues, wistful longing evident in his voice. “What am I learning here? I should have sailed around the world or learned to hunt or started a brewery or something. Shit, man, I should be living.”

Many of Rand’s opinions are shared by fellow scarf enthusiast Anne Oubliette, a U3 student pursuing a double major in History and Literature. She joins us at our perch at the railing about halfway through our discussion, and is kind enough to provide her own perspective on the current state of Arts education at our fair university.

“The romance has just gone out of history,” Oubliette laments. Just this past week she was required to read several papers focusing on figures who weren’t of noble blood. Not even a drop.
A self-described “old soul,” Oubliette has read, at her estimation, upward of two dozen historical fiction books about Anne Boleyn, and a similar number focusing on Cleopatra. She had a masquerade-themed party for her Sweet 16, and keeps a detailed list of historical figures with whom she’d like to “have a torrid two-week affair.” Said list includes but is not limited to Lord Byron, Mark Antony, and Henry VIII, but like, when he was young and looked like Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

“I’m just glad that McGall still has such a strong European history focus. It’s great that they keep that at the forefront. If I went somewhere else, I might have to study, I don’t know, Asia or something.”

Oubliette joins Rand at the railing as he rolls a cigarette, casting her eyes upward, to the leaves slowly losing their chlorophyll. “I’m worried about this generation,” she says, sounding every bit like the person who believes themselves to be an old soul I know her to be. “In these uncertain times, if we don’t have a strong vision of our past, how will we face the future?

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