To begin, I will say I have in my closet, Daniel Fogel, esteemed president of our university. This capture and holding is, as one will imagine, of great value to me as it would be to any others keeping in captivity the president of their school. I assure the readership that this position of unimaginable power will not yield tyranny from the opinionated, but only a better forum for communication between administration and the student.

Saying that Fogel is my captive is not entirely truthful for I feel as though my imprisonment (of Fogel) is really our imprisonment. Furthermore he found his own way into his cell, not was it I who put him there. (That I should lock a door my own would not seem to me a crime.) Thus until it comes that we should set him free, his office is at our disposal, though his mailbox will not be checked for some time.

To set the humane mind at rest I will give details of his confinement and reassure the student of Fogel’s well being. My closet is rather large being 4 feet across and 2 _ deep. It is rather tall as well and stands at over 9 feet. There is a shelf 6 feet off the floor on which he sleeps. I have not yet offered him a blanket, perhaps I will in the days to come. We’ll see. He shares this modest space with my skis, printer and cat, Roger. Roger doesn’t mind him. As my sub-letter, Fogel pays one-half my room cost: $1,277 per semester (I rounded up). He is fed daily, though I’m still unsure how.

I am sure that he is drinking and smoking in there and I seize every opportunity to raid his cell and rob him of what dignity he had squirreled away in there in some dark recess. So far I have seized from his holding three ounces of marijuana, two ‘thirty-racks’, and three beer ‘bongs’.

I’m fuming that he is able to penetrate campus security and the ‘lock-down’ key-card doors smuggling that filth into my house and indeed my own closet. I keep him informed of the outside world and of the workings of his institution by and by, but mostly he cares only for the tuition costs. He’s always worried about tuition costs: “Have they gone up,” he asks, “have they gone up?” I often hear him murmuring about the ever-swelling price tag that comes with running a bureaucracy, and he seems particularly agitated about maintaining strengthening the ‘army’ as he calls the university parking enforcement fleet.

Mostly though when we talk we talk politics and policy and so I might ask, “Why are the professors so poorly paid?”Fogel spurts, “Because potential students don’t give a damn for what the faculty is made up from, they don’t even visit classrooms on the campus tour, I mean what are they really here for?” “Hence your UVM vision includes the construction of a mega-arena and a “transparent cylinder” around the water-tower?” “Hence.” “Why so many eggs in the prospect basket?” Here Dan’s eyes assume a lusty reaching look and he says, “I see an untapped resource in potential students. We can, and will simply expand and expand: more students mean more money.”

“So we’ll likely hire a legion of under-qualified and inexperienced ‘teachers’ to herd mass lectures through prepackaged, electronic ‘classes’?

Doesn’t this, in any educator or pupil’s mind, lower the perceived quality, and the actual quality thereby making our ‘product’ the least desirable of them all, and isn’t this forgetting those enrolled?” “No.””So why do so many leave this school before graduating?””We’re working on that.””I bet.”

I feel as though he is warming to me; I see myself as a father figure really. We’ll see how long I can stand having Fogel in my closet and we’ll see what comes from my opinion of our most opportune capture.