It’s the Second-Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Ah, dear reader, the season is upon us. Soon bright-eyed teens and young twenty-somethings will head off to the four-year drinking marathon commonly referred to as college. Take out the rape kits, folks—your sons and daughters are about to return to their busy carousal schedule.

You can almost smell the glee from college administrators country-wide. As we write this, countless Office of Equal Opportunity czars are putting the final touches on their latest attempts at institutional discrimination.

After a few months spent on vacation at the French Riviera, Marxist “cultural studies” professors are getting prepared to prattle on about the oppressed in their sub-academic courses. Nothing sounds as authentic as a browbeating lecture about the horrors of capitalism from a fellow with a deep tan and a fascination with $5 cups of espresso.

Yes, dear reader, if you listen closely, you can hear the world’s academics and administrators gearing up for the year: Hear that? It’s a faint whisper of the word “diversity” in the air, and, when you can notice it, you know that some faculty member somewhere or other is busy preparing a lecture on Audre Lorde.

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” mention the start of the new academic year for a particular reason. Before it is officially underway, we aim to guess what kind of high jinks will take place on campus during the 2006-2007 academic season.

Last year, of course, meant the dismissal of Larry Summers from the presidency of Harvard University. If you can’t recall that far back, we can tell you that Mr. Summers was given the boot because he dared to posit that a biological difference existed between the sexes. And, naturally, our “diversity”-obsessed faculty was irate. How dare Mr. Summers suggest something opposed to ultra-feminist diktats?

So what’s going to be the big scandal this year? Another Ward Churchill brouhaha? At this point, that’s hardly the cause for a scandal: The faux-Indian doofus has pretty much had his 15 minutes of academic notoriety. And he plagiarized them anyway.

Perhaps some prominent anti-Israeli Middle Eastern Studies professor will get in hot water for heralding terrorist violence against the West. Naturally, he won’t get in hot water on campus—the lauding of terrorist violence is pretty ho-hum in the tony purlieus of academia these days. But maybe this would generate some sort of firestorm in the general public.

But this, we fear, is a rather tame prognostication. If you’re going to bet on the academic scandal of the upcoming year, you might as well proffer a long shot.

Which is why we’re guessing that this will be the year Camille Paglia marries Judith Butler. Mmmm: That’s a lovely image.