The Virtual University

The virtual university was located at the corner of real and world. It was in the business of amazing people. It was where the future started today. It was a place without limits as well as a place where you could push your limits. It was different on purpose; it was where everybody counts; it was imagining the impossible. “Live unbranded” read their trademarked logo, which was a $.

The virtual university didn’t have any students or faculty because who needed them. Those boring old mopes and pajama-clad scrotes only got in the way of creating your best self and daring to dream. It didn’t have classes because you needed to learn at your own pace at your own place, a place that let you take charge of the now and supercharge the forever. It did have a 150,000 square foot gym that had cost $100m to build, because education was a vacation to find your vocation. It paid its legendary football coach “Herc” Broadsides almost that much to coach the 85 uncompensated mercenaries who drew capacity crowds of virtual alumni to its 200,000-seat KFC Double Down Athletic Megatorium.

The virtual university had thousands of actual administrators: assistant deans and assistants to the assistant deans and assistant dean’s assistant’s assistants. What they did was anybody’s guess, but it certainly wasn’t nothing. At the very least, they created things like the Strategic Plan for Growth, the Mission Admission Statement, Initiative 2020, and the Dynamic Interdisciplinary Research Brandcast. Each of these ambitious programs was outlined in a PowerPoint presentation so hollow and amorphous that it was faultless, as virtually perfect as the virtual university itself.

The one problem with the virtual university was that it remained tethered, at least in theory, to whatever the university had done before it, all the moribund mortarboard-and-gown Hogwartsing that struck outsiders as being so 1200-and-late. The lingering referent, with its connotations of the three Rs and the illiberal arts, can’t be effaced–not yet anyway; we don’t have the technology. But god, if it could: a university divorced from its old-timey tweed coat and pipe smoking function, floating aloft in the free air, nothing but slogans and strategery and sweetheart deals for the lucky stiffs who work there…

“We don’t dare to dream,” read the Virtual University’s Mission Admission Statement, “we prepare for it.”

Bro.

–Eeyore Bremen