One Sunday morning at the beginning of the school year, all of the department chairs and faculty officials at the University, still bleary-eyed and tired, woke up early to attend a meeting. only to find University President Joel Seligman frantically moving around hundreds, perhaps thousands, of boxes of cold, hard cash—some with a forklift, some with his bare hands.
When asked if he had obtained the money through some underground drug ring, a heaving, exhausted Seligman replied, “No.”
“This,” Seligman said, gesturing to the tons and tons of boxes containing nothing but cash, “is all of the students’ tuition money not already being spent on the necessities, like that new swing set over by Sue B.”
“The goal of this meeting,” he continued, “is to figure out what we should do with all of it. Do any of you have any suggestions?”
Silence. A voice in the back then yelled, “Lower tuition.”
After the laughter died down, someone else had another suggestion.
“We could give graduate students more money. It could, in theory, yield better results in our research if more students are willing to come here.”
Seligman scoffed.
“Come on. Do you really think our university needs that? Sooner or later those little drones might get the idea that they’re actually free. Then, next thing you know, zip—they’re gone.”
“I just thought that with the salaries they have currently, it might actually increase their productivity if they knew they wouldn’t be skinned broke by the time they leave,” the speaker retorted.
“What the hell do you even do around here anyway?,” Seligman asked.
“I’m the head of the math department.”
“Well, you’re fired. No, don’t look at me like that. Stop crying. Just get out of here. Go. You’re done. Now does anybody else have any real suggestions? Or are we all just going to keep screwing around here like freshmen pre-meds?”
“We could give international students more money in scholarships,” one financial aid officer suggested. Seligman promptly had him escorted off campus.
“THIS IS SERIOUS, PEOPLE,” he screamed. “We need to find something to do with all this money!”
“Why not build a University theme park?” one economics professor suggested. “Then maybe more families would want to send their kids here for a vacation or something. Who knows, maybe years down the line, we’ll eventually see a rise in the number of applicants we can reject.”
Murmurs of agreement ran through the crowd of academics, scholars, and school officials. Seligman looked around, and he asked everyone if they all approved of the idea. They nodded in agreement and, just like that, the University had once again set to work on another goddamn construction project.
Announcing plans for a layout of the park, President Seligman then addressed the University with the exciting news and gave examples of a few of the rides.
The Midterm Spin Simulator, a fast-moving wheel designed to spin you around and make you vomit or your money back, had “real potential,” according to Seligman.
“It seems so real,” remarked one TA, “that it’ll feel like you’re right there in the CHM 131 exam room, sick and exhausted and nauseous, all at once!”
Seligman also said that the theme park would have a giant, intense ride called the Dandelion Day Rollercoaster, in which students would deboard walking off dazed, disoriented, and stumbling, leaving a simulation of “real student experiences” on that day.
Other, less intense rides, including the 8 a.m. Class Merry-Go-Round, designed to make you sleepy and bored and wonder why you ever got on the ride in the first place, were made to accommodate younger children at the university theme park.
All in all, Seligman believed that the park would be a wild success, and we’d see the positive results of better advertisement in a decade. He did not say anything about the immediate negative effects, however, such as increased numbers of prospective students and families clogging up all the damn hallways more and more.
Some students, however, did not seem very happy with the idea.
“I just wish they could’ve spent some money on the frats for once,” one senior fraternity president remarked. “I mean, beer is pretty good and all, but it would have been nice to have some champagne in the punch every now and then.”
Others welcomed the idea.
“I’m really looking forward to being able to vomit all over the place with the excuse that, ‘I wasn’t at a party, I was just on a ride.’ It’ll probably save me that $500 ride to the hospital at least one time, if not many, many more.”
The theme park, construction workers said, will be completed by 2019. Rough approximations made by engineering majors have suggested that this, in fact, means it will be completed no earlier than 3019.
