Exciting news has recently been uncovered as the administration announced the secret meaning behind the iconic slogan “A University on the Rise.” While seemingly a somewhat-truthful tagline regarding the improvement of campus, the phrase was actually a clue as to the final plans for construction on campus: the transformation of Stevens into a self-sustaining, fully-functioning airship capable of staying in the air for several months at a time. The project, worked on in secret by the Mechanical Engineering department, is finally ready to be unveiled to the public.
“The idea first came up when President Farvardin watched Pixar’s Up,” one of the spokesmen for the project described. “We got a call at two in the morning; work started the next day.”
“Have you seen Up?” Farvardin asked in a private interview. “They lift up a whole goddamn house! With balloons! It’s outrageous! What’s the point of having a school full of engineers at your disposal if you can’t get them to do cool stuff?”
Millions upon millions of balloons have been strapped onto every building on campus, all of them in the iconic red and gray Stevens colors. Once Farvardin says the word, these buoyant miracle workers will unleash their magic onto the unsuspecting campus, dragging all of the buildings into the mercy of the skies. Once in the air, students will have to zipline between buildings to get to their destinations, a fact that has unnerved some of the more height-sensitive students, or “wussies,” as they are referred to by the administration. “People are saying that we should strap balloons onto the shuttles, too, and carry students around that way,” one administrator said. “But what’s the point of being in the air if you’re going to hide away in a car? I can’t handle these absolute cowards that are getting in the way of our God-given right of being a University on the Rise. If they fall, they fall.”
Though the entire enterprise is undeniably awesome, there are still some naysayers, even within the administration. “If we leave the ground, then we’ll lose the deposit for the flowers we got for Accepted Students Weekend,” the head gardener lamented. “You know how difficult it is to plant hundreds of flowers in like three days? I’ve got dirt all over my good overalls!”
The school’s escape to the clouds has also angered some students, who regard “University on the Rise” as little more than propaganda. “NYU went airborne over seven years ago!” one impassioned student said in an interview earlier this week. “And their mascot isn’t even a bird! How can they expect us to believe that Stevens is the Innovation University when we’re so far behind on the times?”
Critics have also expressed concern about how this change is going to affect the ungodly amount of construction currently plaguing campus, with the Gianforte Academic Center nearing completion and Hayden and Davis about to be shamelessly destroyed to make room for the Towers of Innovation. “People act like we don’t know what we’re doing,” said one administrator, “which is completely unfair — obviously we’ve thought about how to continue construction in the air. What we’re doing is we’re going to tie a balloon to each brick and set them loose so that they float up to the construction site. It’s a foolproof plan.”
As hundreds of balloons and tanks of helium arrive at campus each day to prepare for take-off, everyone on campus is waiting with bated breath for the day we slip the bonds of this mortal earth and fly unburdened into the great unknown. Once that happens, maybe those fences will actually be true.
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