So there it is. Barack Obama has been elected the next president of the United States. Nothing to be done about it, except to perform the obvious and painful task of conducting a political autopsy to discover exactly why this turn of events has occurred.
With the endowment at Wesleyan having declined by 3.9 percent, there are already more cures being offered for Wesleyan’s financial problems than would be present at a snake oil salesmen’s convention.
“All grandeur, all power, all subordination rest on the executioner. He is the horror and bond of human association; remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very instant order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.”
-Comte Joseph de Maistre
As of now, it is clear to any sober political observer that most college students in the country are likely to break for Barack Obama, who in their eyes is hipper than an MTV reporter, more sexually charged than Dan Radcliffe in “Equus” and able to distill complex policy issues into a single (abstract) noun.
Dear Mr. deBoer,
Considering that you never felt compelled to write in the Argus before now, and I rarely feel compelled to respond to responses to my work, I think we’re both breaking rules here. But I do have to defend myself from your attacks that, I think, arise largely from a misreading of my argument.
Last May, just as all of us were preparing to leave the oasis of intellectual discourse that is Wesleyan and head into the world of summer internships, summer fellowships or even a quiet few months at home, a disaster struck this campus. A series of parties on Fountain Avenue were broken up by police, who used tactics that can most charitably be described as “draconian.”
Until last Thursday, I was under the impression that the defunct Davenport Campus Center would be transformed into a building known as the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, and I found this development to be entirely pleasing. For too long have the disciples of the social sciences been cloistered inside their single building, while more naturally scientific minds were given Hall-Atwater, Shanklin and Exley to serve their academic needs.
Upon picking up last Tuesday’s Argus, I was immediately struck by the headline ‘No Wesploitation’—a highly dramatic title, and certainly one which enticed me into reading the attendant article. According to the writer, apparently the officials at North College are busily engaged in a masterwork of exploitative cruelty designed to make our noble labor unions bend their knees to losing money every year while toiling ever harder to serve their capitalist masters. It is nothing less than slavery that North College demands, we are told, and to make matters worse, the Union might even be forced out by the introduction of subcontractors! Somebody call Upton Sinclair back from the grave, this is really a crisis!
In a stunning report from the Office of Admission at Wesleyan University, it has been revealed that God, the almighty and all knowing, has applied to the University. What is even more stunning, however, is that the Creator was rejected from the highly selective school.
This year, the Usdan Campus Center was introduced as a substitute for that venerable old institution known as McConaughey Hall, or MoCon. Those of us who spent our freshman years entwined in MoCon’s chaotic embrace, which forever smelt of mediocre Aramark food and carried the eternal clang of dropped cups, responded with ambivalence. How could this new, shiny, almost clinically clean building, whose atmosphere barely outmatched Pluto’s, hope to compete with darling old MoCon?