Administration Sets Sights on Finally Improving Racial and Socioeconomic Diversity

HAMILTON, NY— Known for its considerable party scene and hard-liquor dependency, Colgate University was recently ranked eighth on “The Princeton Review’s Top 20 Party Schools of 2018.” Local Beta brother, Bret Pecorino, responded to this news, saying “I think it’s fucking great that all our efforts are being recognized. But it’s important to humble ourselves and understand that we can still improve other areas of the campus.” And even with Colgate’s strides toward improvement, other white, male students can’t help but sympathize in noticing its gaping inadequacies.

The New York Times, in a breakdown of collegiate economic distribution, found that Colgate had a larger student population from families in the top 1% than the entire student population in the bottom 60%. This places Colgate at seventh for greatest economic disparity between students. An underground, pseudo-legitimate Living Writers book club discussed this disturbingly low ranking. Said one student, clutching his copy of The Art of the Deal, “Like don’t get me wrong, I donate my old Vineyard Vines shirts to Goodwill like anybody else, but I shouldn’t be forced to interact with poor people on campus. I thought this was a safe space for me.”

When pressed about the issue and what Colgate was doing to fix it, President Casey responded, “We’ve been trying to limit the economic diversity of accepted applicants for years, but we can’t get it any lower without facing legal ramifications. The Supreme Court has my hands tied. Trust me, if the government wasn’t involved, do you really think we’d still have such a small amount of white students here?” Supporting his statement, the most recent demographic data shows that Colgate has a virtually nonexistent (70%) white student population.

But, being a socially-minded institution, Colgate is no stranger to noticing a lack of diversity on campus. As one First-Year having just been kicked out of DU puts it, “Men are completely underrepresented at this school. We gave the Women’s Studies Department an entire basement! And what’s up with frats only letting girls in? This is 2017. I thought we were past this kind of sexism.”

With a 10% higher population of females to males, the administration is doing all it can to bring male diversity back to campus. In regards to the school’s attempts, Dean McLoughlin said, “We’ve been doing the bare minimum in preventing and investigating sexual assaults on campus in hopes of paring down the female students. We still haven’t made any lists for high incidents of sexual assault, but our goal is to reach Buzzfeed’s top twenty by the end of this year.”

And as Colgate tries to boost PR by moving up on similar online lists, so many aspects of the school remain unranked. The duty now lies with the student body to push the campus into new realms of exploration. As one ex-rower put, “We haven’t even started to compete with other schools in how intense our hazing can be. But we’re planning on changing that this year.” So Colgate continues toward its goal of number one on any list, whatever it may be.

HAMILTON, NY—While the pressure has become almost too intense for the Colgate administration to continue to ignore the massive sexual assault problem plaguing this campus, they have continued to innovate against all odds. When news of the assaults came out a few weeks ago, President Casey sent a heartwarming campus-wide email describing Colgate’s zero tolerance policy with profound messages like ‘violence is violence,’ and ‘I don’t want to comment on this.’ The current strategy has been to focus entirely on discussion. So far, the administration has successfully planned seventy-eight meeting to discuss sexual assault, and is currently drafting two dozen new emails, each the length of a small novella. The administration hopes that with so much discussion, students will become so burned out and emotionally traumatized that most activists will back down, or if the administration is extra lucky, may even take a leave of absence for the semester. “We’re hoping that by saying we’re actively working against sexual assault, people will forget that we actually have done and will do nothing of substance,” an administrator told Rag reporters. “Have you heard about our new cruiser route? What about SPW? Would you stop asking me questions if I gave you a dozen Slices tokens?” Unfortunately, our reporters did cave to this last offer, and the administration has refused to give any further comment since.

While statistics show that binge-drinking, hazing, and hyper-masculinity greatly increase the likelihood of rape on college campuses, there is a lot of questioning as to who we can possibly attribute the prevalence of these toxic behaviors at Colgate to. Rag reporters discussed these statistics in an interview with Beta Theta Pi pledge master Chad Bartholomew-Winston Papolopolis VII, who responded saying, “Totes see your point there, but def can’t imagine it being even remotely related to Greek life. Greek life is all about philanthropy, brotherhood, and like some other supes meaningful stuff.” Papolopolis told us how just a few weeks ago him and his Beta fraternity brothers joined a march on campus, called Give Back the Night to demand the administration give nightlife back to the students and “stop campo from assaulting our rights to rage.”

These recent events have had students asking themselves the difficult question of what they are willing to give up to support survivors of sexual assault and actively combat its prevalence on this campus. The answer? “For sure willing to give up a little, like definitely will send a super public letter about how much we care about sexual assault issues, but absolutely not going to stop getting #lit at fraturday, mixers and formals are obvi a must, and honestly SPW is coming up and do you seriously expect us not to dive into a jello pool and DKE til dawn?”