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| Old: The Stutts Law School is mentioned in the Bible—and very flatteringly, we might add. |
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[The following has been reprinted from Stutts: Jewel in the Bog by Oliver Penniger.]
Stutts University is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, and almost certainly the world as well. Founded nearly five thousand years before the birth of Christ, the University has grown from nine feckless Sumerian playboys to an enrollment of more than 10,000, each of whom is smarter than all original nine combined. An additional 3,000 students are enrolled, more or less, in Stutts’ other programs, which include pSeudo pStutts (summer school), Stutts-in-Gstaad, and ten distinct continuing ed programs, all catering to the well-heeled and bored. Over 14,000 people work at Stutts, and nearly 10,000 get paid for it (the rest have independent incomes). Five thousand more people work for Stutts but cannot admit it, toiling in places like Not-A-Secret-Government-Lab Laboratory, developing droll new weapons.
Twenty-three out of the forty-three U.S. Presidents have been graduates of Stutts. Its faculty have won so many Nobel Prizes that the committee has asked us to stop entering, to give everybody else a chance.
Prehistory
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Stutts, or a Stutts-like University, existed in ancient Mesopotamia. However anything regarding the founding of Stutts must be taken with a rather large grain of salt; Stutts and its rival, Keasbey, spent most of the 1800s bickering over who was older. As the disagreement escalated, each became bolder and bolder in designing fakery to bolster its case.
It soon became impossible to tell where the faux-archeology ended and real science began, as when the first fossils of Diplodocus were initially misidentified as “a typical Keasbey woman.” After President McKinley (a Stutts graduate) brokered a détente in 1900, both institutions agreed to disagree like gentlemen, choosing whatever date they wished, and not mentioning the matter in the other’s presence. The trustees of Stutts chose 3991 B.C.E., from a calculation of the Fall of Man made by the Stutts Divinity School. (Unfortunately, soon after this McKinley was assassinated by a disgruntled Keasbey graduate student.)
Stutts in America
The founding of the American institution is a bit easier to pin down. Sometime in the winter of 1634, several trustees of another, older institution—which one, they wouldn’t say—decided to found a new college in a more soul-toughening clime. Their story was that the students of the earlier college—which may be Keasbey, but then again might not be—were becoming too soft, and refusing to die in sufficient numbers. The wandering trustees were determined to find the wretchedest, most miserable place in the New World; only a setting such as this would encourage the proper mindset to take root. An early plan to conduct classes in the midst of a constant Indian massacre came to nought, when the local tribes demanded time-and-a-half to work nights and weekends.
Just as the trustees were losing heart, they chanced upon a blighted cove the natives called “place-where-the-seagulls-vomit.” Rich with the stench of decay, this pestilential bog was deemed perfect: it combined foul water, plentiful vermin, stinging rains, biting cold and blazing heat. Several trustees died on the spot with enthusiasm. The remaining one founded the College, then promptly went insane from an infected bug-bite.
Slowly, a college is born
This did not hinder the fledgling college from acquiring its first students, which had to be kidnapped from local towns. Parents would invariably reclaim all but the most notorious of their offspring, so from the beginning Stutts’ student body was comprised of the crudest sort of people. The town that grew up around them naturally catered to their needs and desires, and soon Great Littleton was considered, in the words of Stutts rector Incense Mather, “a syphilitic sore on the body of the New World.”
Nowhere was this clearer than the collection of obscene chapbooks bequeathed by the first, insane trustee and added to diligently after his death. Scholars traveled from great distances to Great Littleton to see manuscripts like "Sweaty Strumpets IV: Bloomer Patrol" and the as-yet-nameless college thrived on “a penny-a-peek.”
A name, and a curriculum
The fledgling college took its name from its first benefactor, Lord Elijah Stutts. Young Lord Elijah gave the college’s London representative £120 by mistake, believing he was betting on a horse race. To save face—and keep his gambling habit a secret from his father (who wouldn’t have cared)—he agreed to give the school £80 a year until his death. The new, sane Trustees named the College after him out of gratitude, but unfortunately he died two years later, owing Stutts £160. His relatives stiffed the school, and the Corporation decided that it wasn’t worth changing the stationery.
During its early years, Stutts offered academics based on the English model: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and buggery. (Later, the buggery was replaced with snobbery.) Many of Stutts early graduates became clergymen throughout New England. Their piety did not stop them from wielding their congregations like private armies, intent on destroying rival churches led by Keasbey graduates. These conflicts would eventually ripen into the American Revolution.
Students gone wild
The easy lethality of Great Littleton in the 1600 and 1700’s encouraged an frank morality at odds with Puritanism—which was an exceedingly difficult sell to college kids under the best of circumstances. As the stifling restrictions of early Stutts diminished, intellectual curiosity blossomed. In 1787, the martini was invented by students calling themselves “The Promethean Society.” Tobacco was planted, and sold to raise funds for the endowment; later, this was converted to opium. In 1823, a group of Stutts students took a journey to Florida to “convert” Seminole girls, and the tradition of Spring Break was born. This was followed by fraternities (1831), football (1862), and beer pong (1877). Soon, Stutts boasted a lively, incredibly rich student culture, filled with slang and traditions found nowhere else.
"The College Hole"
Emblematic of this time was “the College Hole,” a small pit dug in a corner of the Old Quad. No one remembers who dug it, or why—only that once dug, it became the symbolic heart of the campus. Classes would battle each other tooth and nail for possession of “the Hole.” But this was nothing compared to the battle that would ensue if a group of townies would attempt to horn in. William Tecumseh Sherman ’47 once said that “nothing I ever saw in the War was as savage as the riots I saw over that d—d Hole.”
Not much studying was being done, and this, combined with Stutts’ growing reputation as a party school, attracted more and more bored scions of America’s new class of wealthy families. They were eager to delay adulthood in as pleasant and irresponsible a manner as possible, this group began applying in great numbers. Seeing an opportunity, the ever-calculating Trustees began raising tuition higher and higher. This only gave a gloss of exclusivity to an already-coveted item. The college’s coffers began to fill, and the outlines of the modern Stutts began to dimly take shape.
“The Revised Curriculum”
With its student body now firmly drawn from the ranks of the Social Register, the faculty and administration of Stutts realized that, as went the education of their students, so would go the fortunes of the United States. So, after a month-long conclave in the sweltering Great Littleton heat, a hallucinating, blue-ribbon panel of academics and administrators emerged with the Revised Curriculum. Gone was the theology of the past, replaced by sound, simple material useful in accumulating, protecting, and growing a fortune. Upon admission, each student would be tracked into material suited to his aptitudes and likely professional interests. Then, he would undergo a four-year process of being fashioned into an ideal modern mogul. As much time would be spent on the social aspects of this job as on the academic ones. In the words of then-President Staunton Cheesborough, “A Stutts man will not only know what knife to use, he will know when it is proper to stick it in someone’s back.” Success, not civilization, was the watchword of Stutts.
“The College Plan”
Working hand-in-hand with the Revised Curriculum was the Cheesborough’s other grand vision: the College Plan. This plan divides the Stutts student body—a hitherto inchoate mass, all too easy for scofflaws and free-thinkers to disappear into—into twelve smaller groups, and houses them in decorative holding pens called “colleges.”
This was Cheesborough’s masterpiece; in a stroke, he diverted the students’ animosity from its natural target, the faculty and administration, and focused it on each other. Furthermore, being part of a smaller group gives every Stutts undergraduate the feeling of constantly being scrutinized by his/her peers. If you can get to those few opinion-leaders in each College, you can control the mind of every student. This keeps nonconformity down to quite manageable levels, and ensures that in times of political strife, the student body’s attention is firmly affixed to its collective navel.
Recent History
Recent presidents A. Grosvenor Paltree, McGregor Paladin, Myron Krok (assassinated), and Preston Whitbread each made significant contributions. Paltree (1923-53) was the first to accept personal checks for the alumni fund. Paltree also signed the decree allowing women to take classes at Stutts without dressing up as men.
Under Paladin (1953-72), Stutts became unexpectedly groovy, garnering much national attention and sending many of its graduates to Hollywood. This allowed both institutions to think that the best of each was being brought out, when in fact the opposite was happening. Many older alumni profoundly resented this grooviness, and much of the campus unrest that took place in Grat Littleton in the late 60s was the result of agent provocateurs many years older. Stutts’ increased profile more than replaced the money lost by disgruntled alumni, and Paladin is fondly remembered.
“The 39 Days”
The Presidency of Myron Krok represents the first time a graduate of another school was elected to run Stutts University. Krok’s short tenure—known in Stutts circles as “the 39 days”—were marked by controversy and ultimately, violence, as President Krok tried to increase the intellectual rigor of the Revised Curriculum. As tensions escalated, Krok (a Keasbey graduate), found himself increasingly isolated. Even “Paladin’s Pals,” the more racially diverse group that the previous President had championed, refused to support Krok; a life of ease is the same whether lived in New York or Rio, and the Pals were no more interested in studying than their American counterparts.
A few days after Midterms, 1972, Krok was killed in an airstrike called in by someone on the Joint Chiefs of Staff; an alumnus and a parent, the General was concerned that his son might not be able to play in the big annual football game against Keasbey, “Gotterdammerung.”
A time of calm and cash
Krok’s successor, Preston Whitbread, was picked to be the anti-Krok. A bland, non-academic, Stutts graduate who makes the University’s prejudices his own, Whitbread has spent his entire tenure focused on one goal: raising money. As a result, the Stutts endowment, always large, has reached supposedly lethal levels; no one person sees more than one small portion of the University’s investment portfolio at a time. Merely entering it into a computer will fry the hard drive. But Stutts is secure, for now and the future, and for that we can all be proud.
