Professor Fendrich wanted to reply as immediately and usefully as possible to her responding readers on a matter of such deep and obvious importance to them as college T-shirts. Alas, she was suddenly called away to an Outcomes Assessment meeting, scheduled to last all day and expected to go on well into the night. So once again I, her loyal and steadfast personal secretary, have been asked to step into the breach. I will do my best to channel accurately my beneficent employer’s thoughts and attitudes.
I do know that she would like to reassure her readers that she gives them permission to indeed where—oops! I mean wear—any T-shirt of their choosing to the gym or elsewhere. (They are also not obligated to eat their babies in order to achieve population control.)
Professor Fendrich is admittedly somewhat taken aback by the intensity of the reaction to her small morsel of light satire concerning a tiny corner of human vanity—the oxymoronic practice of elitist bragging about educational attainment through the populist fashion institution of the T-shirt. She’s also dismayed that nobody expressed any sympathy whatsoever for the unfortunates who’ve earned the right to wear only high school T-shirts. And to those who failed to see the humor in her quite casual essay, she can only quote the esteemed Basil Fawlty: “Not funny? Not funny!?!”
As to a few particulars:
• Rumor at the gym has it that the Harvard T-shirt wearer who prompted Professor Fendrich’s musings is a seventh-generation legacy who, nevertheless, had to steal and pawn his mother’s jewelry to bribe the admissions officer for a place on the waiting list.
• It is Professor Fendrich’s surmise that—unlike race, sex, or sexual orientation—college T-shirt wearing is not a function of one’s genes, legacies notwithstanding.
• Professor Fendrich does understand that climate change is a more important matter than college T-shirts. Therefore, she spends only 38 percent of her time thinking about college T-shirts. If, however, she were not blogging, she would love to be writing a five-volume discourse on the subject. Also, she does not live an “avant-garde lifestyle.” Its rules prohibit gym memberships.
• Finally, to the “Nitpicking Yale alum” and the unforgiving scholar who caught her out on the McGeorge Bundy error: Professor Fendrich would like their mailing addresses so that she may thank them with T-shirts from the schools of their choice to wear to their gyms.
Professor Fendrich just called from a break in her Outcomes Assessment meeting to say that, if I wanted to, I could add my own opinion to the whole T-shirt business. I couldn’t really come up with anything, so I went and looked for something by somebody else that more or less matched my own feeling, and found this:
“Pride that dines on vanity, sups on contempt.” –Benjamin Franklin
