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| Le Dorm Deluxe: The star of Stutts’ famous “Gold Coast,” sumptuous Cummerbund College has appeared in over 200 movies. But you’ll probably get stuck in one of the crappy ones. |
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Stutts students don’t live in “dormitories.” That’s for the losers back at State. Here in Great Littleton, we have Colleges—complex, cranny-filled castles of wavy glass and mossy stone, faux-fortresses fit for “the leaders of tomorrow.”
Big or small, opulent or faded, your College is much more than the place where you eat, study, and sleep—it is center stage for the drama that is your Stutts life. Each entering student is randomly assigned to one of eleven residential colleges: Cummerbund, Gelatin, Bicycle, Lemonade, Corset, Eraser, Plaster, Aspirin, Sand, Brick, and Dacron. (Students can request placement in a specific College; requests should be made out to “Cash.”)
Though outsiders might find them difficult to tell apart, every residential college has its own unique character, and shapes its students in profound ways. Sometimes the ways are subtle; an accent, say, copied from the Master (the titular head of a College) or throwing one’s scarf to the left. Or the fads can be quite marked—a Plaster woman, for example, isn't truly dressed without her corn-cob pipe.
Though these little eccentricities make for a more colorful campus, they can cause trouble, too. For years, a certain fixed look and tendency to drool were thought the harmless affectation of “a Brick man.” Then it was discovered that this was brain damage caused by lead-leaching pipes! Sometimes a College can influence you too much, as in 1968, when the students of Dacron refused to use toilet paper, in support of the “Prague Spring.” What followed was dramatic, divisive, and really better forgotten. We wish we hadn’t brought it up.
“Cheesborough’s Folly”
Just over a century old, the Colleges have been called Stutts’ finest contribution to the modern University. Hastily instituted by President Staunton Cheesborough in the wake of a protracted riot, the College system became the first effective model of student control and surveillance since the feared peniswickenbund of old Heidelberg.
Utilizing the ancient principle of “divide and conquer,” it also brought Stutts’ fundraising into the 20th Century, by giving alumni the opportunity to put their stamp on campus. Before the College system, donors had to be content with “From a Friend.” But as the campus filled with “From a Friend Halls,” it became clear that this policy had to change, as it was impossible to find anything.
Since naming buildings after donors struck Cheesborough as in poor taste, the original five Colleges were named for the substance from whence the riches flowed. Hence Tobias McC. Miller, the ladies-foundation garment tycoon, is commemorated not by "Miller College," but by Corset. This practice immediately hardened into tradition.
For the last word on Stutts’ residential colleges, we’ll defer to Oswald Penniger, the University’s greatest historian. “Each College shuns outsiders, and keeps its rituals and mysteries, however silly, close to its heart,” Penniger wrote in 1923. “This allows for each to believe itself an elite within an elite. The meaningless, incessant competition between these entities adds a final thimbleful of rocket fuel onto the roaring bonfire of Stutts ambition. And that’s just the way the students like it.”
