BURLINGTON – Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, today The University of Vermont’s president, Suresh Garimella, announced severe austerity measures that shocked the Burlington community.
“The Davis Center is the pride and joy of UVM so it’s with great pleasure that we announce it will be fully renovated into a multi-story laser tag center. This will be the creation of a new revenue generating unit this fall.” Asked to clarify, Garimella said “It’ll be awesome and rake in the cash.”
The administration then rolled out plans hand drawn by Garimella himself, along with the board of trustees, at their last meeting. The plans were on several napkins taped together. “UVM is still ‘the environmental university’ so the lasers will be compostable. We still have our values!” he added hastily.
“The pandemic has brought hard times upon us all and we’re sorry to see them go, but sadly yes, we’ll also be cutting all the student work-study employees.” He continued, “I know this is unfortunate, and I know that many Vermont students are only able to afford an education through work-study jobs, but we had to do something to cut costs.”
When asked how much money they need to cut, or how much they are actually saving by cutting low wage workers, he seemed to not hear the question, but added, “and I know it’s going to be hard for our graduate students to continue without the TA jobs that help them pay tuition and also give them invaluable teaching experience, but yes, they’ll have to go, too.”
When asked how faculty would manage large lectures without work-studies and TAs, Garimella continued “Oh, that won’t be a problem because we’ve cut them as well.” Asked to clarify, he added, “We’re cutting all educators from the budget. They are extremely costly and we all have to make sacrifices at this difficult time.”
When The Winooski asked what sacrifices the administration is making, Garmella stated “well now we’ll have to teach the classes.”
Garimella explained that due to cutting all TAs and faculty, the administration would now have to teach the students arriving on campus this fall. He said this is really laborious because “some classes are really early” and “they seem to meet like three times a week.” He also explained that while most of the UVM administration don’t actually have PhDs themselves, they have plenty of useful skills to teach the students. He said he and other administrators are already coming up with ideas about how to teach students how to fire people. He said he’s found this skill very important in recent weeks and likes to keep his coursework relevant and “topical.”
When asked what other cuts the university would have to make he pointed out that “the library will have to go, full stop. The UVM library is full of dusty old books. We don’t teach stuff in books, so what’s the point? I don’t see how they are essential to firing people. The library is a great building, though so we may use it for something fun like an executive arcade or spa. We could create some jobs that way. Arcade repairmen need to work, too!”
Many students complained that they ‘actually wanted to learn some stuff,’ and ‘enjoy certain books,’ and were ‘hoping to get jobs after college,’ Garimella pointed out that, “we all have to make sacrifices.”
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