University Introduces Live Bears to Campus in Crackdown on Safe Spaces

By Reed Thurston

Aug. 17, 2017

After last year’s controversial memorandum on free speech, the university doubled-down on its commitment to intellectual free enterprise this week. Administrators revealed a new “curricular reinvigoration” project designed to promote more challenging discourse across campus through the use of untamed and unsupervised bears, to be released and used for education both inside, outside, and beyond the classroom.

Highlighting the administration’s dedication to cultivating an atmosphere of academic survivalism, Dean of Students John “Jay” Ellison penned a new letter to students last Friday, emphasizing that “the inherent challenges of an environment in which no viewpoint is expressly protected or prohibited are vital, not only to the personal growth of every student, but to the development of a collective conversation in which disagreement and discomfort are taken on headlong as welcome aspects of the Life of the Mind, also bears.”

After providing more details on a newly-established academic exchange program with the Nova Scotian Coastal Wildlife Preserve, Ellison’s letter explained that “the eight-hundred pound North American brown bear, commonly known as the grizzly bear, is one of the most terrifying and genuinely dangerous mammals native to this continent, and will no doubt help foster precisely the kind of intellectually un-coddled environment necessary for truly rigorous and inquisitive dialogue throughout the greater university community.”

While no further information was given as to the size, speed, or number of bears to be released at the end of O-Week, the Shady Dealer has uncovered an email from the university’s dining vendor Bon Appetit detailing a weekly salmon shipment large enough to feed a sleuth of at least twenty-five bears.