One would think,
well, I would, that given the sparse personnel resources of the Queer Studies
Department, we (that is to say, technically, I) would be exempt from various
extracurricular responsibilities, but for some reason Dean Withers, my own
revered Dean in the School of Special Fields, thinks otherwise. He seems to
reason that since I have no one to administer, I must have bountiful leisure
hours to devote to the sorts of creative things that university students do in
order to avoid actually improving themselves.
Among these many
things is Freshman Orientation Week, inevitably called Weak Freshman
Disorientation by the more experienced WHOvians. This takes place the last week
in August, just prior to registration and the beginning of the academic year.
About four hundred and fifty carefully screened social misfits – all duly
certified by the AntiSocial Certification Process overseen by the
afore-mentioned Dean of AntiSocial Studies – descend upon our leafy campus and
are herded into dorm rooms that vary from hideous lime-sherbet green to a pale
Pepto-Dismal pink, colors that pseudo-social scientists, or social
pseudo-scientists, have determined will calm the raging hormones and ire of
eighteen-year-olds. I believe the original research was actually done on prisoners and
the patients at mental institutions, but it was a small step to see that it
would apply equally well to several hundred late-adolescents crowded together
for a prolonged period of time.
PPHU students who are about to enter their final year of studies work as mentors, leading
small clusters of incoming freshmen. “Incoming!” some wag always shouts when
they are crossing the Quad, gawking at the crenellated tops of the faux
medieval cloisters. The seniors-to-be haughtily ignore the shouts and, walking
backwards in the time-honored gait of campus orientators, keep up a bright
chatter about the history of this, that and the other, pointing randomly at
whatever building they happen to be tripping past at the moment. Any accurate
information gleaned by the newcomers is largely a matter of luck or
coincidence.
In olden days of yore, when I
attended freshman orientation at Midwestern State Megaversity and dodged the
dinosaurs that still roamed the earth, we took placement tests, wandered around
the campus and went to “mixers”, sad little dances where people who already
knew one another from high school crowded together in a largely successful effort not to meet
anyone new. Since those innocent days, the social scientists and university
marketing people have resorted to icebreakers and games to knock down barriers
and build bridges. Or something.
The idea makes some
sense, I suppose, at a normal university. PPHU, however, is a special case,
given its preference for students who don’t fit in anywhere. Getting these
folks to break down barriers and build bridges is no easy task. That has not
prevented Herkimer “Give Me a P!” Jones, the head of recruiting (the
department’s real task is unabashed marketing), from trying. And one of his
brainstorms is the Crossword Caper.
For the purpose of
the Caper, the incoming are broken up into aggregates – I hesitate to call them
teams – of thirteen. Apparently group dynamics research shows that thirteen is
the maximum size of a group in which each member will know every other member
on a personal basis. That this is the same number of people that centuries of
tradition told us should never sit down to table together seems not to have
dawned on the group dynamics people. I guess they never wondered why the first
person to get up from one of these sessions always seemed to be the first to
quit. (You thought I was going to say the first to die, didn’t you? Just how
superstitious do you think I am?)
If everyone who is
invited shows up, there are 35 aggregates of thirteen incoming. Each aggregate,
or congeries* for the over-educated, is encouraged to give itself a name, in
itself a pointless and usually futile exercise in team-building, and is handed
an official Crossword Puzzle on Monday evening of the Disorientation. The
completed Puzzles are due back no later than Thursday midnight at the
Recruiting Office. The time the Puzzle is returned is recorded so that, in case
of a tie, the first aggregate to have submitted the correctly completed Puzzle
will be declared the winner. Much honor and glory is supposed to accrue to this
aggregate when their victory is announced on Friday at the concluding
ceremonies. To the best of my knowledge, no winning aggregate has ever gone on
to do anything together again once all this is over.
At any rate, as one
of the faculty overlords of the Disorientation, I help construct the Crossword.
Why this task cannot be relegated to some piece of shareware designed for such
a purposeless purpose, I know not.
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* Congeries [from the Latin congerere,
to heap up] means a bunch of things piled together. Although it appears
to be plural, it can take a singular verb. Which makes it of interest to me as a
queer thing, singular, even. (Sorry!) I first ran across it in some story by
H.P. Lovecraft, and the word itself did lend a note of horror to the writing.
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