The Research I University in 2031: A Dystopian Nightmare

Using my handy “futures app” on my new iPhone, I located a description of the R-1 University 20 years down the road. I’m listing here the most salient characteristics for your perusal. Turns out we’re wasting time with all this fretting about the future of higher education. Relax! The future is already determined! Sit back and read about how wonderful it will be.

• The university will have 100,000 undergraduate students. 95,000 will reside off-campus and will take their classes online.

• All classes will be graded solely by bubble tests. The position of Provost will change to Vice-President of Bubble Tests. The position of Associate Provost will change to Vice-president of Bubble Test Outcomes Assessment.

• The mission statement of the University will read as follows: The University’s primary mission is to maintain eligibility for the football team to participate in the NCAA’s 25-game regular season, the two month’s of bowl games serving as playoffs, and the Bud Light/Cadillac Escalade/Tostitos American Supremacy World Championship Bowl to be played in Texas Stadium on or about March 15^th. In addition, the University strives for the advancement of anything leading to gainful employment immediately upon graduation, and promises to create perfectly docile future employees ready to be plugged into jobs that may or not exist in the future, as demanded by top CEO’s and state legislators. The University offers multiple opportunities for students to confirm what they have thought about the world ever since the seventh grade.

• The football team will be considered a Legacy of the University, and all football recruits will be automatically admitted as Legacy admissions, regardless of academic qualifications.

• The 5,000 students in residence on campus will be required to be members of ROTC and the uniformed student rooting section. They will be required to smile when walking by any of the multiple surveillance cameras on the nearly empty campus so that their pretty faces may be used as photo-ops for promotional purposes on the Web.

• The faculty will consist of a supervisory skeleton crew of 67 tenured faculty—chosen for their appearances on talking-heads television shows and books on the Kindle bestseller lists, as well as the amounts of grant money funneled to the University—and 17,500 adjuncts and gastarbeiter instructors.

• The Administration will consist of a CEO/Athletic-Director, and his staff of 100 Vice-Athletic directors, as well as 1400 Vice-Presidents, and 2750 Assistant-Vice Presidents.

• Counseling services will be outsourced to phone banks in Mumbai.

• In order to recruit football players and to play games in optimum conditions, all R-1 Universities will relocate to the Sun Belt, e.g., the University of Michigan will become the University of Michigan at Del Ray Beach, and the Ohio State University will become the Ohio State University at Yuma.

• The Core Curriculum will center on The Lloyd Blankfein School of Business major, with at least two special required courses in the ongoing, still unsolved solution to the Great Mathematics of Derivatives Last Theorem. Three minors will be permitted: Computer Science, Broadcast Communications, and Sports Administration.

• The hard sciences will be grouped into sponsored, discipline-specific schools, e.g., The Exxon-Mobil School of Geology, The Lockheed Martin School of Physics, The Pfizer School of Pharmacy, and the Monsanto School of Biology.

• The College of Liberal Arts will be condensed into a small Department of Useful Humanities, housed in a closet in the basement of the Central Sub-Administration Building (a building lacking a human name until a rich humanities donor comes along). Its courses will include Advertising Copy Writing, Graphic Design for Web and Print, The History of Free Enterprise, Adapting Great Books for Miniseries, and the Sociology and Psychology of Consumers.

• The School of Performing Arts will be renamed The School of Halftime Shows, Movies and Movie Stars, and its curriculum reconfigured accordingly.

• Three foreign languages will be offered: Spanish, Chinese (in the Business curriculum), and Arabic (under ROTC).

• The motto of the University will be Pecunia Super Veritas.

• Classes in poetry, painting, drawing, Classics, non-martial music, non-halftime dance, useless history and anthropology, pathetic fallacy philosophy and others to be named on a case-by-case basis, will be considered activities subversive to the mission of the University. As such, they will be under constant surveillance.