It goes it goes it goes it goes. Illustration by Redietu Haile
A new student initiative proposes that UR’s recently announced tuition increase for the 2019–20 Academic Year should fund the purchase of several totally superfluous guillotines. The initiative, put forward by the UR student group Center for Historical Overthrow Preservation (CHOP), aims to make sure that “certain historical events, circumstances, and consequences are never forgotten.”
“We figure that some nice, new, totally functional, and extremely lethal guillotines would serve as a nice reminder to ALL on campus what will – I mean, what HAS happened when the people were pushed too far,” CHOP President and sophomore Rainn O. Terrer said. “We also figure that, with the UR tuition bump being so high, at least a fraction of it could go toward the realization of our completely benign proposal.”
Guillotines, of course, are closely associated with mob justice and the violent overthrow of a monied, aristocratic upper class. Though the proposed guillotines would be extremely capable of decapitation, CHOP has insisted in both its initiative and in subsequent press releases that the execution machines would theoretically never be used.
“What you have to understand here is that the guillotine is a situational tool,” Terrer said. “No one wants to run around cutting people’s heads off without reason. You need massive inequality, ideally with a cartoonishly evil upper class totally unaware of the sufferings of those below. You would need to have some kind of institution that was obscenely expensive to gain admittance to.
“Then you would need to make the world around the institution worse and worse, so that the only way to stay alive and have some modicum of grace would be to give the institution all of your life savings in hopes of one day having even a chance of moving up the class ladder.”
Terrer then looked around the room, fiddled with his hands, and said, “But we don’t seem to have something like that here, do we?”
Top UR administrators, last seen either covering for Florian Jaeger, squashing debate over arming Public Safety, or diving Scrooge McDuck-style into a swimming pool filled with the money for 2019’s executive bonuses, were unavailable for comment.
