In response to a recent rash of verbal assaults targeted at socially-affluent students, the administration unveiled an aggressive new program to combat player-hater crimes at Wesleyan.
“At Wesleyan, we take great pride in the safe haven of diversity we create for our students,” President Bennet said, speaking at a formal announcement ceremony outside North College Wednesday. “But when students here are discriminated against just because they get down with mad honeys or fly hotties, the very fabric of our institution is threatened.”
The new campus-wide program calls for the installation of a new set of emergency phones across campus that, when activated, will loudly play R. Kelly’s “Re-mix to Ignition” while exuding a smooth, lava lamp-like orange glow. Additionally, a new Player Resource Center will be established to increase awareness of player hate crimes, which will also double as weekend dance club and open bar.
The announcement comes on the heels of widespread student outrage over a number of player-hating crimes reported in the two weeks. In the most recent incident reported by public safety, Dale Ruben ’06 was corralled after leaving a party by a group of assailants who proceeded to violently insult his choice of cologne and superb taste in designer clothing.
“Players are people too,” Ruben explained during an interview while polishing a martini shaker. “Like the baller and shot-caller communities on campus, players should be respected for the collective way in which we choose to roll.”
Student members of the Player Lifestyle Awareness Youth Against Haters (PLAYAH) lauded the new program as a much-needed reform.
“When one player is assaulted on campus, all players are threatened, no matter how tricked out their flavor may be,” said PLAYAH vice-chair Shira Smith ’07. “Just because a given player never returned your calls after that one night last weekend, doesn’t mean you have the right to strike out at hir.”
Although, the administration remains reluctant to commit to a player-blind housing policy, the new programs has raised hopes.
“It’s time we acknowledge that some people simply don’t feel comfortable ascribing to the strict binary of player or baller/shot-caller,” said Smith.
Player hater crimes are a relatively new issue on the Wesleyan campus, largely because the Office of Admission did not begin actively recruiting players until 1995.
“We’d been listening to lot of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony that year, as I recall,” said Dean of Admission Nancy Hargrave-Meislahn. “We saw the numbers coming out of Yale and Amherst and realized that we didn’t yet have enough wickedly fresh student players up in our grill.”
Members of the faculty have also come out in enthusiastic support of the new program.
“Our culture is oriented around highly baller-normative assumptions, and we often neglect to remember that players can be marginalized within that implicit space,” said Assistant Professor of Sociology Nathan Cording.
“We must strive to always remind one another of that indelible human truth: don’t hate the player, hate the player’s discursive framework.”
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