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The Yorker has received reports of growing difficulties for students and staff, as professors fear from day to day that their departments may close, and arts students have taken to travelling through campus in tight huddles, looking out for economics and medical students trying to take their dinner money. Not only that, but there have been repeated sightings of an English lecturer begging for change from sport socialites outside Reflex on Wednesday nights.
A particularly spine-chilling incident last week will do little to allay these fears. An eye-witness tells The Yorker: “I saw a large group of people in lab coats outside Derwent, shouting and throwing things. I got closer, and there was a woman in the middle of the circle trying to catch the scraps and bits of small change the students were throwing.” The reason for this? “I asked someone who told me the woman was a History of Art postgrad. They were asking her questions about Pre-Raphaelite artists, and if she answered correctly she got a reward. I think they were just chucking anything, bits of food, a few pennies. But they took it all back from her if she answered incorrectly.”
A quick survey of student opinions confirm such growing contempt for arts and humanities on campus. Opinions of History and Philosophy ranged from “pointless” and “a drain of resources,” to “dangerous in this unstable political climate.” A senior lecturer in the Economics department, Dr Paywell, concurred: “It’s up to us and the scientists to keep this civilisation moving forwards. We’d never get anywhere with the arts and humanities lot, with their obsession with questioning, always questioning.” He shakes his head ruefully. “Make a decision and implement it. This is not the time for thinking about reasons, or ethics. And it’s especially not the time to be writing about it. Or worse, studying what someone else has written about it!”
The head of the English Department did not deign to respond, instead quoting the poet Robert Graves: “If there is no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.” Scoffing, Dr Paywell said, “That’s exactly the sort of crap I’m talking about.”
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