Published: Tuesday, December 8, 2009 in The Whitworthian.

Hark! The herald! It’s Christmas time! A time of family, a time of togetherness, a time of gifts, a time of celebrating Christ’s birth.

But most of all, Whitworth students, Christmas is a time when we sit alone in our rooms with a triple peppermint mocha and an Excel spreadsheet trying to figure out how the heck we’re going to be able to afford to come back in the Spring.

Complaints about the cost of education here are old hat. A Whitworth education is worth the cost of being here. If it wasn’t … well, we wouldn’t be here.

That said, it is still a weight on the old wallet. I’m not going to whine about how broke I am (totally broke); nor will I give you an address to send envelopes stuffed with cash to (student box 2313).

What I will do, like the good merry old soul that I am, is offer up the solution to this crisis.

You may remember in one of my earlier columns I suggested that professors should begin throwing bricks in the classroom to assert their authority.

While this plan hasn’t yet been implemented, I’m quite sure it’s being added to the new strategic plan for the next ten years. However, as brilliant as that idea was, this one is even brillianter: slave labor.

Now, now, put down your thirteenth amendments and hear me out. This slave labor wouldn’t be all that different from anything we’re already doing.

It would be a required set of classes: think Slave Labor 150, 250, and 350. To encourage hard work, each class would be worth 60 credits with a failing grade given to anyone who didn’t whistle while they worked.

The brilliance of this plan is that it is beneficial for both students and faculty, but mostly for students. Students would learn valuable skills while taking the slave labor classes.

Grunting and lifting heavy objects; pain tolerance; in 350 there would even be room for learning how to form a union and rise up against your oppressors.

The truth is, students need to learn how to do mounds of pointless work for no better reason than because the Man wants it done.

Man: Dig ten thousand holes! Then fill them with these huge rocks!

Student: My good man, the existential qualities of anthropology and axiology of the situation…

Man: Shut yer gob! What do you think this is, that other 150 class? Move those rocks!

This will serve the purpose of teaching us how the real world works. Everyone knows that only a very small percentage of us are actually going to get jobs after we graduate. No one is hiring.

The representative for Every Employer in America (EEA) recently sent me a letter saying that while he like what I had to offer, unfortunately his clients are putting a hold on job interviews until sometime in the mid 23rd century.

With this in mind, slave labor classes would teach us the value of the pointless hard work we’ll all be doing in our post-Whitworth years. They would also effectively replace the need for PE class requirements.

The most immediate benefit, however, would be that Whitworth could drastically reduce its overhead. Imagine it, administration! How much money could you save with a constant and renewable slave labor force? Tuition would drop faster than Newton’s apple!

So put those energy drinks away, fellow students, and close those spreadsheets without saving.

You don’t need to play the lottery, get a job, or even ask for Whitworth Tuition gift cards this Christmas. All you need to do is pen a quick letter to Bill Robinson asking him to get behind the slave labor initiative.

While you do that, I’ll get down to coming up with my next brilliant plan to make your lives better. What a guy I am…