Fred’s University is considering merging the English Department with the School of Public Health as part of its initiative to promote reading as self-care.
Research has shown that reading makes you happier, reduces stress, helps you sleep, and can add as much as two years to your life when practiced daily.
The Dean became aware of this research when he went to the library to escape from his depressed unpaid Gen Z interns and finish his latest Tom Clancy novel. A School Library Journal poster in his favorite hidey-hole in the library advertised these health benefits and got him thinking.
Generation Z is less interested in worldly success than well-being, and if they could be convinced reading was a wellness practice like Kale Smoothies and yoga, it might be possible to save the significant endowment dollars tied to the English Department.
English degrees are down 20% since 2012 but the Dean is convinced this is a marketing problem not a problem with the product itself. He also suspects that some of the decline can be attributed to parents pressuring their kids to choose more practical majors. The Dean hopes to persuade parents that an English degree could save them on therapy bills for their depressed kids.
The School of Public Health is betting that Gen Z students will respond better to the health and happiness benefits of reading than the standard arguments for the economic or intellectual benefits of literacy and are eager for the merger.
But one group that has resisted the new campaign is English professors who feel the dignity and prestige of their profession are undermined by equating reading with Xanax. The English Chair is still reeling from an earlier attempt to merge the English Department with the newly established Department of Podcasting and is staunchly opposed to the proposal.
A solution to the impasse came from an unexpected place: the depressed Gen Z interns in the Dean’s office. They pointed out that English professors almost never get to read for pleasure because they are so inundated with academic work. If anyone needs some lit therapy, it’s English teachers for whom the joy of reading has been hollowed out to an abandoned mine shaft of toxic despair.
As part of Phase One of the new initiative, the School of Public Health will therefore be offering literature clinics for English professors. Volunteers have been recruited to read aloud to English professors in tents set up on the quad. And since most English professors have not been able to read any new novels since they entered graduate school, donations of contemporary literature are being collected at various points around campus for their benefit.
Professors in the School of Public Health, who are avid readers and love novels, are eager to retrain English professors burned out on research and boring academic writing to administer reading to anxious depressed students.
The School of Public Health has also advocated for replacing all Friday admin meetings with Friday Office Poetry. “Not only is administrative bloat bringing colleges to bankruptcy, but it is also bad for public health,” argued the Chair of the School of Public Health (who always wanted to be an English major but his father wouldn’t let him). “Let’s replace academia with reading.”
Taking advantage of the literature giveaway for English professors, the Dean has read his first non-Tom Clancey novel in decades. He missed his first Merger Meeting because he had to read the last chapter of The Woman in the Window.
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