Campus newsletters and discussion forums are replete with negative comments about the impending semester conversion, from loss of tuition revenue to the extinction of December break.
But one voice has remained silent: the lowly multinational conglomerate.
Did anyone consider how tobacco companies will be affected in the change?
Previously, sales for stress-relieving and energy-enhancing products showed significant spikes during three specific times: finals weeks. But starting this fall, those profits will be reduced by a full 33 percent, because there will only be two finals weeks.
“This sort of reckless disregard for the interests of big business should not be tolerated,” said Marlboro executive Joe Carlson through a thick haze of delicious cigarette smoke.
Carlson said Marlboro and other tobacco companies are considering whether to pull funding for University research. Currently, an undisclosed number of vastly underpaid graduate assistants are working in substandard research laboratories to determine if nicotine is addictive.
“I hate to play hard-ball, but (University President) Mark (Yudof) and his (Board of Regents) cronies leave us no alternative,” said Carlson, inhaling deeply the sweet taste the arsenic and lead.
“When bullsh*t starts talking, money starts walking, er, no … you know what I mean.”
Another aspect of the impending financial disaster is the impact on local merchants. One local entrepreneur, who declined to be named for fear of criminal persecution, said he may start to rely on other money-making efforts to replace the lost revenue.
“Ever since they started those diversified core requirements, cigarettes have been more profitable than the heroin trade,” said the merchant from behind his glass counter filled with tobacco water pipes.
“I might have to start making a few more calls now.”
Although local merchants will be hit hard by the switch, it’s the little guys who will feel the hit the hardest. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Philip Morris and Lorillard Tobacco are a few of the companies left out to dry by the University. In fact, the switch to semester schedules is a national trend; The University is one of the last schools in the Big 10 to make the switch.
“This is just another example of the hostile, anti-business environment that companies are increasingly finding at universities everywhere,” said Carlson, who waited until he had the mature reasoning skills of an 18-year-old before he made an informed decision to begin smoking.
“This whole issue harkens back to the original question that President Lincoln asked himself in 1862, when he signed the Morrill Land Grant Act,” Carlson said.
“Who owns these institutions? Is it the big governments and bureaucratic administrations,” he continued, “or is it the hard-working American businessman who just wants to feed his kids tonight?”
“Just what are the priorities in American higher education today?”