Humanities Layoffs Cause Mayhem Among Students With Abandonment Issues
MJ
The recent announcement that the humanities division will be laying off many major-specific advisers comes as a terrible blow to humanities students with daddy, mommy, and other assorted issues. Students and faculty members alike struggle to comprehend why the university would choose to cut advisers in a department that is widely known to be full of emotionally dependant and needy young “adults.”
“I just don’t understand why this is happening,” says Willow Moon, a junior and Creative Writing major whose poetry almost exclusively involves stoic and withholding father-figures. “Was I not good enough? Not interesting enough? Are the advisers leaving so they can spend more time with Jenny the barista who they say they’re not sleeping with, even though I had to bail my mom out of jail for keying Jenny’s car in a wine-drunk outburst?”
While we wanted to assure Willow Moon that what’s happening is not her fault and probably has nothing to do with this “Jenny” character, we decided to end the interview early to avoid her latching on and making one of us the new authority figure in her life. Besides, she is not the only student feeling unsettled by the impending changes.
Mitchell Alexander, a Cinema and Media Studies Major, remarked that “the nightmares are back. Just as I was beginning to feel a sense of security in my life, they have to go and get rid of the people who are contractually obligated to listen to my anxiety about my choice to take classes where the main life skill I’m learning is ‘how to watch movies’. What am I supposed to do now? Go to actual therapy? Change my major? Yeah, right.”
In an attempt to understand why the university is making such a traumatizing decision, we reached out to Frank Reed, dean of the humanities division. Reed claimed that the choice actually has nothing to do with budget constraints or low enrollment, but is in fact “for the students’ own good.” He stated that, “Look, these are artists we’re talking about, right? And they were just getting too comfortable. Adversity inspires good art, so really, these twerps should be thanking us.”