Wow! It's another bullshit IQP! "Marketing the WPI 'H.O. House Politically Correct Lingerie." None of these illustrious feel-good programs, paid for by your tuition dollars, seem to address the fundamental issue of why WPI students routinely binge drink.
Well, strangely enough, it begins with my journalistic tangent. For those of you in Freshman English, this is called foreshadowing. Many of WPI's less challenging IQP's involve teaching basic subjects to local high school students. These are a snap. Preparation is minimal, since the WPI students involved have just completed the work themselves. Furthermore, education, the most useless of the liberal arts (talk to anyone who's dated an el.ed. major) is almost entirely theoretical: there is no empirical way to measure good teaching. Local schools are lousy enough that WPI students are seen as a plus by parents. Local schools are crowded enough that WPI students are seen as a plus by teachers. Local high school students, on the other hand, are... female!
Needless to say, when your school male:female ratio is 6:1, high school students start looking -really- good. And -really- easily impressed. And -really- cute and kittenish.
So, many IQP's are begun in the hopes of meeting eligible women. Many binges are begun in the hopes of meeting... a cute roommate? Making one's roommate look better? No, that's not quite it. But that's part of it. There are very few eligible women on this campus. The ratio, for all the flowery rhetoric spewed by various offices of the great Tower On The Hill, is about 6:1. As a female friend, wise enough to not go here, pointed out, a law of supply and demand is in effect at WPI. Women have something men want. Hygiene, for one. But they have other marvelous attributes as well, which could be considered to be a commodity. Short of biologically risky living arrangements, there is more demand than commodity. This creates a condition called scarcity. And when a commodity is scarce, the price goes very, very high.
So we drink. A lot. Why do women drink? Well, the situation isn't any better for them. Lots and lots and lots and lots of really desperate men like me are constantly pestering them for a date. After a while, this gets disturbing. There isn't a big pool for female friends. Since the dating situation is so twisted, the pool for male friends isn't so great either. So women drink too.
What else? Worcester sucks. The city hates the colleges, mass transit is non-existent, and the downtown is dangerous. Our courses are a lot of work. We have no (well, very few) liberal arts students to create activities for us. Our activities are created in spare moments and free time. Since more work is not exactly a draw, and organizing activities is, by its very nature, work, not a lot gets organized.
So we sit around and drink. Sometimes we watch a little TV. We get off on occasion to Playboy and Hustler, and once in a while to National Review, but that's just lonely, really, and most of us have roommates and such.
I go to other local colleges, but I've got a car. Relying on the shuttle is foolish, and makes one look silly on dates. "um, I'll be down at 9:30 sharp, ok? And if you're not there by 9:31, I'm leaving. Hello? Hello?" The natives are a proud but simple people, but their women are often stunning, and lack that Engineer's Pallor that is so unattractive by candlelight.
So, we drink because there's not a lot else to do, despite the claims of the Tower On The Hill.
Two weeks ago my column lambasted SGA. I suggested that SGA should be replaced, and discussed various foolishness including an insane budgeting process and a lack of election publicity. In response, two letters were written complaining about me to Newspeak. Let us, for the sake of satire, call the two authors Ann Richards and Prime Minister Chamberlain.
Ann complained that I made sexual jokes, made fun of SGA, and was uninvolved in the school. As Ann doesn't know for sure who I am, the last note seemed a bit fishy. I might, after all, be an administrator of WPI. Or the ghost of Dr. Alden. Or maybe someone who deserves special respect or something. Is drunken covered under Affirmative Action?
PM Chamberlain, on the other hand, defended SGA by claiming that SGA did a lot behind the scenes (I'll give him that, though not exactly how he meant, I'm sure), and held a protest two years ago that was so successful that SGA is too scared to hold another one.
Both of them, however, concentrated not on the message but the medium. They felt that writing anonymously was essentially cowardly, and in a politically correct vein should thus be banned (me & Rush - I like that - burn that darned Constitution).
Well, here's the deal, folks: I write controversial columns. This school needs some serious self-explanation. I, on the other hand, need my kneecaps... and financial aid... intact. Therefore writing anonymously seems like an intelligent thing to do. This country has a history of pamphleteers, from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King, who oft wrote under pseudonyms to cover their tuchus. It's part of that free speech thing. My columns are satirical. Sometimes they sting; I certainly hope so. However, I believe that elected representatives should not be immune from editorial and journalistic criticism. The bitching about Newspeak's use of pen names started this week, by the targets of last week's column. These complaints were not motivated by journalistic ideology, to say the least.
If you can't take public complaint, then you shouldn't be in government.
To Laurel & Guinevere, whose complaints were of a gentler nature: No, darlings, I won't publicly trade my identity. But I'd love to take one (both? maybe the loser has to go on the second date or something) of you to dinner sometime. No beer, I promise. I like your column.
Hugs and Tickles, G.F.
Ok, enough rebuttal. Here's my:
Love,
Gadsen Flag, Esq.