FIGHT THE FUTURE! YALE IN 3K

A brief on the investigation into Yale University's distant future, December 1999:

Odysseus got his money's worth when he went to the mouth of Hades to consult the blind seer Teiresias. In exchange for a ditch full of blood and an IOU for a quality black sheep, Teiresias provided a precise account of Odysseus' situation and his destiny, including step-by-step tips on how to get the drunken louts out of his palace in Ithaca. It's a good thing for the publishers of Life's Little Instruction Book that blind prophets are in short supply these days.

Unfortunately, our present dearth of reliable oracles hasn't decreased the number of predictions. While certain crackpots' forecasts—such as that of the man who appeared on The Daily Show to warn that Pez dispensers would be the currency of the future—offer amusement, the sheer volume of such predictions is consciousness-numbing. The new millennium has become boring before we've even reached it.

But even if the media have already strip-mined the next few years bare, the centuries after that are still fertile territory. So the Herald undertook a substantive investigation of Yale's fate in the approaching millennium—as in, the entire millennium. Despite the crucial role the college experience plays in shaping us as individuals, the future of higher education is rarely hypothesized. And yet for four years it pilfers our sleep and pummels us with our own ignorance until, as proud graduates ready to change the world, we march forth and accept investment banking jobs.

Will Yale still seriously impact society in the Year 3000? Will the University's present American Studies program metamorphose into Ancient American Studies, allowing our legacies' legacies to bang out last-minute papers about the American family as portrayed on The Simpsons? Will dining halls overcharge future Yalies for 21-meal varieties of execrable nutrition capsules?

To cover as much hypothetical territory as possible, the Herald commissioned a three-pronged inquiry into the state of the University in the Year 3000. Each employed a separate investigative method. A copy of this issue will be vacuum-sealed in a lead-lined canister to be opened a millennium hence. The people of the future may read it and laugh at our folly, but we are not afraid—the feelings of the long-dead are rarely hurt by a bunch of pissant college students.

Extrapolatin'

Over the course of 299 years, Yale has journeyed a long road. Along the way, past events and traditions now act as signposts, pointing convincingly toward the University's ultimate destination. Certainly, Yale's period of great expansion is behind us, which means the University will spend a few hundred years vigorously preserving its existing structures. As University forefather James L. Kingsley wrote to Benjamin Silliman a very long time ago, `Let them at Cambridge try experiments, and we will try to profit by them. They are better able to experiment than we are.'" Hence, the more Yale attempts growth, the more it will get stuck staging donation drives (as it should in the fall of 2315) in which current students cold-call alumni, only to discover that these potential donors believe their alma mater has been going downhill since they graduated. Soon, Yale will reach equilibrium, and normal operations will resume.

With the University's essential mission intact, change will take place only as advances in technology modify the execution of that mission. But given mankind's present sneering at such advances in technology, we should not expect our new Blue to be utopian: humanity's ability to become jaded greatly outstrips its inventive capacities. That's why the Internet enjoyed a brief spasm in our decade as an incredible medium of information exchange before devolving into a clearinghouse for used goods and porn.

HARK! A NOTE FROM 3000 Greetings, friends, from January of the Year 3000! To you, this date must seem a long way off indeed. Yet for me, it is the date which my 365-day Dilbert calendar shows right now! It truly is a remarkable time. Yet not all of the future is office-based merriment and mirth. I bring you dire warnings, and I urge you to heed them, else you should all undergo numerous plagues and airport delays. Heed me well, fools! Firstly, stay away from the region you call the American Midwest as the millennium draws near. Your contemporary historians will note that each and every one of the parties there sucked, and much time that you could have spent drinking and making merry were occupied by listening to the Carpenters and playing the game you call "Jenga." Travel not to Columbus, Ohio! Go to Vegas and see the concert of the one known as Bette Midler. Trust me, for I am from the future! Young students of Yale, heed me well, for it is you who shall lead the world, your consulting firms and investment banks which will provide business and investment solutions for the new millennium! First, forget the first 18 lines of the Canterbury Tales, for Satan himself shall rise from the depths in 2014 and claim the souls of all who can recite them from memory. Second, kiss the asses of your professors and—how do you say—"grub" your way to the best marks possible. After the Population Boom of 2020 and the subsequent coup by the superintelligent liquid metal robots, all those with college GPA's lower than 2.9 were exiled to Southern California to give tours of the stars' homes. Much other advice can I proffer you, O twentieth century man. Be sure to masturbate vigorously at least eight times each day, for it is good for you. Cease your cloning of sheep, for sheep are useless poop machines that consume valuable oxygen. Continue to eat Dunkin' Donuts, lest the great Bavarian Crème perish from the Earth. Do not have children between the years 2005 and 2010. Trust me on this. Oh, and wear sunscreen—when the sun explodes in 2040, you'll need it. Yours in peace, Baron Stevataphone Ghillanius

Calculations show that new cures will lengthen the average lifespan in the 23rd Century. But in the past, people have adjusted to such cures quickly and found new ways to die. Similarly, we now know that Yale's freestyle duelers of 3000 will be able to actually sever each other's limbs, then instantaneously regrow them, but it remains hazy as to whether or not this will improve the sport. The ability to make such instant repairs will, fortunately, result in the return of bladderball.

Other more controversial areas of campus life will be affected. According to In Plato's Cave, a book by former Yale professor and provost Alvin Kernan, GRD '54, sexual politics completely reinvented itself between the '50s and the '80s. "Student-teacher sex had by [the early to mid-1980's] become commonplace...[A]s time went on, predatory sex in the classroom became bolder." How, then, as time goes on, will technology alter improper student-teacher relationships? Scandals generally find ways to come out, and at Yale's present rate of three every four years, we will see ever more bizarre accusations of improper relationships, sudden crimes, and festering vices, culminating on Fri., Feb. 3, 2824, when a professor will be arrested for grafting a student onto his body, forcing her to live in symbiosis, and claiming that it's love.

Our initial stabs at calculating Yale's union turmoil—in which we fed the computer data from the past four years—yielded a grand total of 3,832 strikes and 9,002,387.2 protests. Realizing the unfairness of our methods, we tried a different one. Given the encroachments of Fusco and Aramark, it seems the unions will eventually be crushed. The future of Yale's workers may be that of those in Fritz Lang's Metropolis—toiling robotically for an all-devouring Moloch of a university.

This conclusion, of course, assumes that we are not all robots by then. An October 1994 article in Scientific American predicts , "Once we know what we need to do, our nanotechnologies should enable us to construct replacement bodies and brains that won't be constrained to work at the crawling pace of `real time.'" Our descendants in 3000, then, will be able to produce their Simpsons papers with assembly-line speed, then get drunk with the same breathtaking efficiency. During AE[[pi]]'s "Night of 10,000,000,000 Jello Shots" in 2991, an overzealous freshman will consume one-third of the refreshments and be taken to DUH, where he will explode.

It may turn out that we'll be lucky if we're even robots. Studies estimate that the world's temperature will have risen by 1.5 to six degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Continued warming, combined with the resultant rise in sea level, would put New Haven under water. Yet if our nanotechnology permits the creation of gills, Yale may remain an elite center of learning.

Pick the Pros

As members of an institution, we are familiar with the eccentricities that may shape its future. With this in mind, the Herald asked members of the Yale community to predict what the future holds for their school. Excerpted results follow:

Tom Beckett, director of Yale Athletics: "Perhaps instead of fans at a game, there'll be some piece of equipment transmitting it to people, taking it all in through their computer."

Jeffrey Dorough, TC '01, chairman, Party of the Right: "Every student will have his own undergraduate organization. Students can earn credit for protesting the cause of the week; it falls under the `lab' category. New Haven will be completely owned by Yale, and it will be a sea of tacky chain stores. Harkness Tower will be replaced by a big statue of the GESO man."

Amanda Bell, DC '00, member, Students Against Sweatshops: "After the Great Crash of 2002, President Richard Levin, GRD '74, and hundreds of other Yale administrators and Corporation members had to, like many newly toppled First-World plutocrats in that painful decade, sell themselves into indentured servitude in garment factories and the new landfill-picking `plantations.' The $12.55 worth of bottle caps and animal bones the brave group saved up after 10 years' toil made Yale's endowment the largest in the world at the time."

John Merriman, history professor: "Yale will have four more colleges—three on campus and one floating a mile offshore with hourly boat service back and forth."

James Ponsoldt, MC '01, president, Yale College Council: "I would be surprised if much changes about Spring Fling. Rubber balls are fun. Shiny objects and things that glow are fun. Why do we need to get more complicated?"

Allan Stam, political science professor: "A thousand years is so far into the future that no predictions are meaningful."

Professor Stam's warning left the members of our re-search team too ashamed of themselves to continue with the survey.

Dreaming a little dream

Although dreams may not predict what the Babylonian-Assyrian Dream Book says—that if, in a dream, a man's "urine expands in front of his penis and fills all the streets, his property will be robbed and given to the city"—many great thinkers have stood behind the dream as a possible source of prophecy. Aristotle wrote confidently, "On some subjects divination in dreams is not incredible but rather reasonable."

In our researcher's attempts at a precognitive dream on Tues., Nov. 30, he discovered that the Yale of 3000 was vastly altered. Certain colleges consisted of giant towers set in vast, walled-off courtyards and reaching toward a permanently red sky. Lawrance and Farnam halls still stood, but they were nearly deserted. His visit to the two dorms revealed a 30-year-old white male clad in shredded sheets. The man lived in an attic and was apparently the cause of a recent rash of student disappearances. After gibbering indecipherable phrases, he fell down the stairs and was simultaneously arrested and killed.

Our researcher attempted to integrate himself into the fabric of the University, but couldn't access any lectures. All were apparently located in Hall², which featured a multilevel chrome walkway and video screens lining the wall. No doors or rooms were in evidence, however.

His attempts to participate in hands-on classes such as art likewise came to no fruition. Sculpture sessions were situated in a cavernous black room with movable walls. Since the greatest possible achievement in art at the time was a giant clam made of papier-maché, the small plywood city our researcher made and turned in late was met with scorn. A girl with red hair mocked him and burnt his arm with a cigarette. Others surrounded him and took turns symbolically castrating him until he awoke.

To the people of the future:

These were rough estimates of what we thought might come to pass. If we erred—and we probably did, since we neglected to frame our predictions in the vagueness that allowed Nostradamus to forecast everything from Hitler to Gilligan—we hope that they were, at least, entertaining. P.S. If all of humanity is dead: Ha ha ha.