Sciurus Non Carborundum

It is a hectic week here at Enema U.  Students are due back in just a few days, so in keeping with tradition, there are several sweeping changes and campus alterations being announced at the last possible moment.  It is a well-known concept in education that nothing can be truly improved until it is totally destroyed.

So it follows that quite a few streets, parking lots, bicycle lanes, and walkways have recently been closed for renovation and repair by the MOB (Maintenance Of Buildings) office.  As explained by Vinny Giaconno, the Associate Assistant Executive Vice President of Renovations, “These repairs will be completed by the end of June, long before the students come back to class.  Besides, we’ve been busy negotiating a new waste removal contract.”

The Personnel Department has been equally busy.  All married employees have been asked to produce copies of their marriage licenses to prove they are not defrauding the health insurance program.  Evidently employees are guilty, and single, until proven wedded.

I figure this is probably a mistake, at least in my case; they probably meant to ask for a copy of my parents’ marriage certificate.  I think I can save them the trouble: I will readily admit to being a bastard, but it had nothing to do with my parents’ marital status.  I am proud to admit that I am a self-made man.  Prior to coming to work for the university, I was only a self-made son-of-a-bitch, but I’ve been eddicated.

Perhaps the biggest change, at least for the faculty at Enema U, is the new digital measures program.  For years, the administration has striven to perfect a process whereby they could evaluate the performance of faculty.  Consider the problem: all the administration could rely on were arbitrary concepts like enrollment, class popularity, student evaluations, peer assessments, publications, or service work for the university and the community.  Wouldn’t it be much more efficient if the administration could figure out a simple digital, and statistically manageable, measurement system to tell them who were the truly productive faculty?

You can imagine the excitement here at Enema U when the new evaluation process, the Numerical Uniform Teaching Scoring System (NUTSS), was announced.  Developed by the Head Rodent in the Office of Moose and Squirrel, the faculty was sent a memo this week announcing that (at a full dress convocation in the coming week), she will proudly show off her NUTSS.  And while she acknowledges that her NUTSS are modestly small at present, before long her NUTSS will be found in every departmental office on campus. 

The pilot program has been extremely promising.  It was tested by the Department of Creative and Interactive Social Justice Education, and while the faculty was originally justifiably afraid of the administration’s NUTSS, before the trial period was over, many faculty members were publicly saying they were ready to give up the old system and kiss the administration’s NUTSS.

Said Professor Ken Holland, “I had never handled NUTSS before, but after a while I got used to it.”

Initially, there was some concern that a computer virus might contaminate NUTSS, but this problem was quickly licked.  The Administration urges that only routine protection should be used while using NUTSS.  Or as one member of the administration said, “No matter what you heard, our NUTSS are safe to use.”

Regular use of NUTSS, essentially a large database, will soon insure that everyone in Administration will be able to access complex reports relatively easily.  The goal is to have NUTSS exposed to every faculy member by the end of the semester.  Within a very short time, even department heads will be able to produce sophisticated reports by manipulating the Administration’s NUTSS.

Proudly, Enema U developed NUTSS and nothing like it can be found at other universities.  This situation may soon change, as several universities have expressed an interest in seeing our NUTSS.  One administration official is reportedly emailing photos of our NUTSS worldwide.  In the years to come, there is no telling where you could find Enema U’s NUTSS.