This email was submitted to the Court of Modest Proposals as part of the prosecution’s evidence that UTD’s administration has been acting maliciously towards its student journalists. When asked whether he believed the defense had ill intent, UTD President Bichard Renson took a drag of his cotton-candy-flavored jumbo Cuban cigar and said, “I didn’t know we even had a student newspaper.”

To: bichardrenson@utdallas.edu, murder@utimco.com, dean@studentjournalismsux.edu, 20 others

From: stumedirector@utballas.edu

Subject: Another woman in STEM* bullied out of the workplace 🙁

To my esteemed colleagues at this glorious tax scheme — oops, I mean secondary education community — that we call UTD,

It is with a heavy heart, empty pockets, and ten missed calls from the Dallas Morning News asking for comment on the university’s latest PR disaster that I am announcing my immediate resignation** as Director of Student Media. You may not know who I am, but I consider that a personal success. From the depths of the sweaty Student Media office, I have leveraged my severely underpaid position successfully enough to demolish a student newspaper in just a few short weeks… and I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.

As the administrators overseeing Student Affairs, it is our solemn duty to nurture the fragile young minds that look to us for guidance. We must give them opportunities to grow and aid them when they err, well, since UTD keeps spending its gulag fund on taking state legislators out for lunch, we must resort to more… old-school re-education methods to correct undesirable behavior. I have deployed multiple techniques developed in Guantanamo Bay to keep these brats in line: calling the breaking news reporting they spent days on and risked their own arrests for “journalistic malpractice”; demoting their advisor; compromising their pay; comparing them to my rapist gynecologist; illegally removing their newspapers from kiosks; hiding their budget; firing their Editor-in-Chief; and unleashing lethal doses of contrived Gen X metaphors that have not been observed in nature since mankind split the first plutonium atom — the shit that killed Marie Curie.

But instead of becoming free, unproblematic PR for the university like I wanted, these woke liberals went on strike!

Whatever happened to college kids being kids? Sweet, baby-faced, impressionable, and burning alive with red-hot inferiority complexes about never being good enough for their parents that make them ohso-eager to please? When did they learn all this complex vocabulary like “picket line” or “bylaws” or “protest,” and where did they find the nerve to talk back to their superior when all I did was give them a nonconsensual hug or misgender them to their faces? (Why, yes, I did use my compliance training certificate as stuffing for the former student newspapers I keep taxidermied on my wall, thank you for noticing!) Back in my day, people used to know their place.

I know the school’s Student Brainwashing Committee doesn’t convene for a few more months, but I’ll propose a suggestion you all can add to the agenda: once we have more money in the budget, let’s create a module in the remedial education course where students learn to tolerate being touched against their will. If you need an instructor for that, let me know and I’ll call my gynecologist!

Ah, well, I’m sure you all know the drill. Once students start acting up and refuse to be satiated through the typical methods, you have no choice but to escalate. Normally, indiscriminately destroying everything students hold dear to create a perpetual cycle of learned helplessness and overreliance on Real Adults™ works just fine, but for some reason, these scrappy student journalists have mastered arcane, forbidden techniques like “reading” and “critical thinking,” which have bested me in mortal combat. Normally, when I kill a newspaper, it’s because I was running it behind the scenes and wearing the paper’s student staff like little finger puppets to make it look like it was by-students, for-students. And once I leave that newspaper’s advising role, the paper collapses and all us administrators can feast on the carcass like vultures, ready to absorb its content into our PR Torment Nexus 3000. But UTD’s student journalists wanted real control, so when I tried to put their shrieking, rabid alley cat of a publication down, they simply formed a new paper instead. The dishonor of my defeat at the hands of glorified toddlers has led me to write this email, after which I will ritually shave my head and then blame those damn kids for it. (Yes, you’re all invited to watch. There’ll be margaritas.)

In my absence, I hope you all will continue fighting the good fight, and find a technique that actually works to turn these shameless kids into obedient worker drones for our friends at Lockheed Martin to slurp up through their blood-money silly straws. We’ve got to keep our employment-after-graduation numbers up, and no one in the Fortune 500 wants to hire a journalist — least of all a good journalist!

I never wanted it to come to this, but I suppose I can’t hide any longer. My desperate financial situation may already be obvious to you all, considering I unironically accepted this position at UTD for a salary most other qualified professionals found frankly offensive, so I’m making one final request. Please send my resume around, and put in a good word for me when you can. My soft skills include talking for an hour without saying anything meaningful, critiquing a publication without actually having read it, resolving conflicts and communication issues through my decades of incompetence, and more — all hallmarks of a faculty member that a university just cannot do without!

Thank you, and see you in whichever circle of Dante’s hell is reserved for those who make weird microaggressions against autistic people.

(And don’t forget about the resume!)

**Editor’s note: She was fired.