I want my money back immediately.
I wrote this tongue-in-cheek column about four years after graduation. I say this because some fellow alums or admins may feel butt-hurt after reading it. I graduated in just three years and started working as a reporter while still in school. In retrospect, I wish I'd stayed in college longer.
Published Sept. 18, 1994; distributed by Copley News Service
By Dennis Robaugh
To: My alma mater
From: A recent alum
Re: My disappointment in your Bachelor of Science degree
Dear Sir or Madam:
When I decided to purchase an education at your school, I was thrilled and a bit trepidatious.
This would be the first major purchase of my life, not counting my awkward attempt in the 10th grade to buy condoms at the pharmacy from the local druggist. I wanted this to be a great life experience. (College, I mean. But, yeah, the other thing, too.)
I spent many thousands of dollars and worked hard pay for tuition, books, and living quarters, and I believed it when you said a degree was key to finding gainful employment and achieving professional satisfaction. Your sales pitch was enticing, but regretfully, I've concluded that you failed to deliver.
I believe I've used your product responsibly and correctly, but your Bachelor of Science degree has proven insufficient in what has increasingly become a service economy — a dog-order-out-for-dog world, if you will.
My attorney has advised me to seek a refund from you and return your faulty product. I would sue you, too, for the severe stress of learning to use your product has robbed me of most of my hair. However, my attorney says the current atmosphere of entitlement hasn't made this tragedy actionable in court. Yet.
So below, I have listed everything I learned in my three years at your institution — or as much as I can muster from memory at this time.
• William Shakespeare was a great playwright who transformed the theater. Shakespeare may have actually been another writer, like Francis Bacon.
• If you throw up after kissing the girl you met at freshman orientation, it's probably best not to call her for a second date.
• American Studies is a class where we discovered that everything learned in high school civics is based on lies perpetuated by the all-powerful white patriarchy.
• Never eat cod on bun in the dining hall.
• Sometimes, guys think they should sign up for a Women’s Studies class to meet women. This is a mistake.
• No. 2 pencil. No. 2 pencil. No. 2 pencil.
• Some of the grad assistants who teach reporting did not commit acts of journalism on a regular basis.
• College Republicans are very earnest, and College Democrats are just as pathetic as the real ones.
• Obsequious is a mode of being, not a bodily fluid.
• The student lounge is on the second floor of the mass communications building, and that's where John K. puked and passed out after I took him drinking the night before his final exams.
• Yes, that is why the room still smells funny.
• Ernest Hemingway's mother dressed him in girls' clothes when he was a little boy. She also bossed his father around a lot. This is why his unfinished novel “Garden of Eden” is filled with gender-bending themes and sex. A lot of sex.
• Many Greeks had Great Ideas about the natural world and the society of man. We spend a lot of our time rediscovering them over and over again.
• Aristotle was one of those Greeks
• What mother always said about “those girls” was correct. (Thank the lord.)
• Sometimes you think a lot of your classmates were smarter than you, but then you remember some of them scrawl those messages on the men's room walls. (I think they were Business majors.)
• Keep moving across the stage when you get your diploma, and do not throw your cap in the air when the ceremony concludes.
If I remember anything else, I will return it to you immediately.