Student Disgusted by “Horripilating” Decline of UChicago’s Intellectual Culture

The University of Chicago has long been known for its quirky, intellectually inclined students and its status as a haven for rigorous, philosophical debate. In the past decade, however, some students have complained that this culture is declining, particularly due to the University’s efforts to lower admission rates by broadening its appeal and swelling its advertising programs. Reporters from The Dealer pulled aside an anonymous first-year in the Regenstein Library to discuss what they described as UChicago’s “horripilating” decline. 

“I chanced upon a coterie of students discussing Cartesian doubt in Max P the other day,” the student recalled. “I thought I might engage them in a dialectic, yet it became imminently apparent that they’d never even perused the infamous pages of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. At the very least, they’d indubitably failed to even glimpse the intricacies interred therebetwixt.” The Dealer has emailed several linguistics professors to figure out what “therebetwixt” means. As of this article’s publication, none have responded. 

“I applied ED to this derelict institution under the fatuous impression that it was still a citadel of higher thought. Yet with each passing day I am compoundingly impelled to think that we are naught but a lugubrious asylum for the academically impaired. All my HUM seminars have been vacuous at best and practically inimical to cognitive function at worst, and no one has even attempted to pose a counterexample to my budding theory of meta-meta-metaphilosophy. It’s a disgrace.” When asked who they might blame for UChicago’s decline, the student answered, “I believe you meant to ask ‘whom I might blame.’” 

Asked for clarification on the meaning of “horripilating,” the student merely stormed off, muttering something about the “vespilline” and “benighted” quality of The Dealer’s reporters and saying they had an Honors Analysis P-set to finish.