In what experts are calling a “revolutionary approach to post-secondary education,” fourth-year Brock University student Paige Turner has reportedly mastered the ability to successfully debate the 250 pages of weekly readings she never even glanced at.
“I think what really stood out to me was how Baldwin et al. boldly interrogated power structures,” Turner said during her Thursday morning seminar just moments after hearing the names of the authors for the first time. “It’s all very nuanced.”
Witnesses claim that Turner delivered the comment with a high degree of confidence, all while making direct eye contact with her professor and nodding thoughtfully. To the untrained eye, her performance was flawless. No one would ever know that instead of actually reading the journal articles she was assigned, she spent the previous evening watching binge watching Love Island.
“At this point in your university career, you’ve either got it or you haven’t,” Turner stated matter-of-factly during the interview The Brock Press conducted with her last Wednesday. “And if you haven’t got it, then you might as well not come to seminar at all.”
Turner is not alone in this practice. Across campus, many Brock students are engaging in what scholars describe as a “collective performance of scholarly engagement,” in which nobody has actually done the reading, but everyone behaves as if they have.
In order to be successful, students suggest that you must display the aesthetic of preparedness. This includes carrying the text around with you everywhere in order to showcase your vast array of annotations. Sticky notes, underlining and aggressively dog-earing pages are essential in maintaining the illusion.
“I honestly highlight random sentences,” Turner explained. “It doesn’t really matter what they say. It just has to look like I’ve suffered for my scholarship.”
When the time comes to contribute in class, students have started to rely on a series of carefully curated vocab words designed to sound as insightful as possible without ever truly revealing anything about the text. Words like “problematic,” “lens,” “framework” and “interrogates” are deployed strategically, and often in long sentences that start with confidence and end leaving both the speaker and the listener confused.
“I think that if you talk long enough, no one will really question you,” Turner said.
Many students also lean on the “strategic agreement” technique, which looks like them waiting for a classmate who has actually done the reading to speak before beginning their own commentary. Said commentary usually starts with an agreement statement which is then followed by a slightly altered version of the previous students point.
“Truly, it’s about building on ideas,” Turner clarified. “Mostly other people’s.”
In high-pressure situations, such as being cold called by a professor, students have learned to employ a series of delay tactics, such as asking for a moment to gather one’s thoughts. This buys them enough time to scan the text frantically before assembling a sentence that sounds meaningful but always says very little.
By mid-semester, however, many students report a startling realization: nobody else is doing the readings either.
“It was sort of freeing,” Turner said. “Like we’re all in this together. None of us know what is going on, but we’re all going to pretend.”
This article is part of a special edition of The Brock Press for April Fools and is completely satirical. None of the content contained within this article is meant to be representative of reality and all quotes have been fabricated.