COLUMBUS, OH: Considering the less-than-tasteful financial decisions that have been made by the Ohio State University in the last two weeks, many observers would conclude that the administration seems to have all but forgotten to care about allocating its funds properly.
One major controversial decision made recently concerned the existence of a women’s space on campus. While almost all Big Ten schools besides Ohio State, including Michigan, already have Women’s Centers with full amenities, the Ohio State University decided “ehhhh, we don’t REALLY need one of those, do we?”
We asked an administrator this week to elaborate further, and they told us that they don’t have a Women’s Center for students “because that costs money, and spending money is annoying! And we’ve heard the whole “1 in 4 OSU students will be sexually assaulted while attending the university” thing time and again, but USG is totally all over that problem with their “It’s On Us” campaign, which has proven itself to be *completely* effective. It’s all going to be fine, even without a Women’s Center!”
Instead of considering a full women’s center, the Ohio State University has been relying upon a considerably less expensive alternative, the Women’s Student Initiatives, or the WSI. The University thus far has expected that WSI will somehow provide adequate support to all of Ohio State’s 30,000 female students within its two hours of operation every week, even though it barely funds WSI in the first place, citing tight finances.
“Yeah, I mean, Ohio State gives us money to exist most of the time,” said a representative from WSI. “But it’s not even enough for us to run our weekly programming as it is, and we have to pay out of pocket a lot of the time for things. For last week, I had to pay for the snacks and the pizza and the printing and space and such, and Ohio State forgot to pay me again even though they’ve been saying “we’ll remember next month, we promise” for maybe, I don’t know, 6 months now?”
Unfortunately, Ohio State quietly decided about three weeks ago that it would cut funding from the WSI because “ehh, we don’t REALLY need one of those, do we?” The decision made by the administration, if carried out, would mean women at the Ohio State would have no place to go for support centered on their needs at the University.
Meanwhile, Michael Drake was congratulated for his work thus far as president of the University; not just with a pat on the back or a high five like the rest of us when we do cool things, but also with a raise and a bonus of 200,000 dollars, which we were repeatedly told “absolutely, positively could not have gone to anything else.”
Just with these figures and facts kept into consideration, it is apparent to the Sundial Humor Magazine, an expert on the subject of university bureaucracies, that the University did not care about its finances OR what its students, who are often falling into record levels of debt in order to attain their degrees and meal plans, thought about the decisions made by the administration in recent weeks.
So, why aren’t students up in arms about the blatant mis-allocation of funds by a supposedly non-profit university?
Two words: Afro. Duck.
The famed duck mysteriously had vanished from Mirror Lake about a year ago, initially leading to a sense of loss among the student body. As of Thursday, November 12th, however, the duck had once again been spotted doing duck-things in Mirror Lake, its favorite swimming hole on campus. The duck’s re-appearance has led to widespread celebration on social media.
While it seems that the students are very happy with the return of Afro Duck, staff-writers from the Sundial couldn’t help but notice that something seemed off as to why the duck had returned to campus after being gone for so long, especially with the other strange happenings in regards to the University’s finances. So, the Sundial Humor Magazine decided to conduct an entirely objective investigation into the matter. According to a poll subsequently conducted last week by the magazine’s staff writers, 3 percent of students had heard about the potential defunding of Women’s Student Initiatives, or WSI, and about 5 percent had heard about Drake’s bonus; meanwhile, 95 percent of students had heard about Afro Duck’s return to campus. After noting the great discrepancy, the magazine decided to talk to the administration about the situation, as it is very easy to talk to higher-ups at the university when students have legitimate problems with the way the University runs.
When asked, the University had no problem discussing the subject with the Sundial Magazine, adding that “it doesn’t matter what we tell you because no one will read the article you guys write about it anyway, you people have like ten regular readers, right? Besides, we’ve been very clearly been wasting the money of students for decades on everything besides paying our professors enough money to survive, and everyone knows it.”
“We put [Afro-Duck] there to distract students from what’s going on with the money, because what’s going on with the money is, well, I’m not even gonna lie, it’s pretty bad, and we know it,” said President Drake during his interview with the Sundial this past weekend, which definitely happened in real life. “We knew students would go nuts if they had Afro Duck back and would forget other happenings on campus, so we used this opportune time to put their attention elsewhere while we did blatantly bad things with their money. And from what I can tell, we’ve been wholly successful. I’ve only gotten like 15 angry emails from students, when I probably deserved several hundred, which I would have gotten if it weren’t for Afro Duck’s reappearance on campus! Hopefully things stay this way so that I can use my bonus on a new swimming pool that I was going to build over the break.”
“It was also quite the trouble to obtain an Afro-Duck adequate for the job of distracting the students,” said one of the other administrators. “We had to pull quite a few bells and whistles to be able to fool students into thinking the duck we got was the same duck because, um, and don’t tell anyone this, okay? The original Afro Duck isn’t even alive anymore. He’s totally fucking dead. And uh…..now, this part is SUPER TOP SECRET —-I’d prefer you not write this down, reporter “journalist” lady— we, well, we killed him because we were worried his fame on campus was starting to take away from Brutus’s popularity. We just couldn’t have that, you know? It just—yeah, it was tragic, but it was for the best, we had previously thought.”
“But now with this new potential crisis we had on our hands, we knew we had to obtain another Afro Duck in order to distract the students from our unethical use of their money. We ordered another duck like a month ago in preparation for this, and that was expensive enough, I think it was $15,000 dollars? We were, however, willing to pay any expense necessary to make this plan work. But it came in with a brown afro, even though we *very clearly* ordered one with a white afro, so we even had to dye its hair—is it hair? Well, we dyed its afro white and everything in order to fool the students. And uh yeah, despite all the work that went into it, I’d say it’s paid off very well for us as a whole. No complaints, no nothing. Everything’s great!”
What do you think? Do YOU think OSU’s ploy to deceive students with Afro Duck has been successful? Do you think Afro Duck has been used as a pawn by the University? Let us know by tweeting your thoughts with the hashtag #funnysunny.
-Stav, Senior Staff Member and person who will probably get in trouble for writing this article but also doesn’t really care so take that, haters