Professor Josiah S. Carberry,
As your assistant and personal amanuensis Truman Grayson recently shared with me prior to his encounter with a most audacious and agitated affenpinscher, you are currently not planning to make an appearance on campus for an entire academic year. Whether that decision is due to your daily schedule being even more crammed and hectic than even those of the most overconfident and bombastic members of this year’s bright-eyed first-year class or rather a simple lack of any of the months in the 2012-2013 school year possessing a Friday the 13th, I for one cannot stand to let such a travesty befall this most esteemed institution and its intellectually curious student body. Indeed, due to your notable track record of absence from your scheduled lectures, you have condemned your reputation to a state of obloquy — absit iniuria verbis — and have left the students in a state of perpetual woolgathering.
Many such students now choose to attach their soporific selves to nugatory causes instead of ones that might actually foster cogitation. Just look at Brown’s Divest Coal campaign: While last year we were concerned about 1 percent of American citizens’ wealth, this year we are concerned about 0.1 percent of Brown’s endowment. I’ve never been good with numbers, but I’m pretty sure we’re heading the wrong way here. After all, even courses like “physics for poets” and “rocks for jocks” require students to earn 10 percent in the class to pass. In fact, perform similarly in certain Russian literature courses and you may just earn distinction. Worse still, psychoceramics as a discipline has taken a backseat to such balderdash concentrations as Egyptology and economics. If departments like Judaic Studies are able to recruit two concentrators, clearly we should be able to do the same.
Unfortunately, it would appear as though Brown students haven’t been exposed at all to the noble discipline that is psychoceramics. As a recent study by the Center for Research on the Advancement of Pottery has shown, only 42 percent of Brunonians are aware of your contributions to the field, while an astounding 69 percent of them still cling to the antediluvian notion of ceramicnormativity. Are a pot’s cracks truly justification for demoting it to the status of a second-class citizen? Why do we even begin to question the dish’s decision to run away with the spoon if they were both of age and truly loved each other? Is the fact that the little teapot is of a more stocky build really an adequate cause for tipping it over and pouring it out? And when are we going to solve the racial tension at the heart of this class hierarchy that permeates throughout pottery’s society? Why should China be of higher value than Ivory Coasters? And what of the kettle — haven’t we reached a point in our existence where we no longer simply dismiss it as “black?” Isn’t it time that it and the pot stop all the hitting, join together, light up a peace pipe and hash out their differences? These are the questions that we as a community are going to have to address soon, and we cannot begin to do so unless someone actually speaks up. Nonce is the time for recrudescence!
I matriculated to College Hill desiring nothing more than to earn a B.S. in psychoceramics. But I can say I’m nothing less than distraught at the shambolic nature and apathetic attitudes that appear throughout the entire organizational “hierarchy.” It’s truly as if no one cares — they all elect to simply beat around the bush. I believe that you, Professor Carberry, are the man who is needed to help us begin to change things here. My point here is a blunt one: While I know there have been no Fridays the 13th this academic year, I believe you are morally obligated to come speak on campus. Given that this graduating class is the class of 2013, I can think of nothing more fitting than for you to accompany our class in our commencement ceremony aliquo modo. Be it through a speech at convocation or attendance at the baccalaureate ceremony, you owe it to our class to make your presence known.
I apologize for my animadversion, but given the gravity of this matter I felt that it was for the greater good of the institution. With your help, I know that we can once again make psychoceramics the noble study of cracked pots, not a cushy area of study for weedy potheads.
Ab imo pectore,
Master Daniel Gleesach I
Daniel Gleesach I ’13 is thoroughly unimpressed by the New Curriculum and spends his time reading dictionaries — Latin and English, of course — and studying esoteric subject matter.
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