“Balance is a very important part of this university,” said Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye, who said that her proudest accomplishment to date was when she noticed a glaring omission in the student body — undergraduates under 4 feet tall — and decided to fill the gap by offering admission to Snooki.
Snooki refused to come without the rest of her crew, however, so the University struck a deal with MTV that allowed the Viacom subsidiary to film a show on campus. In return, the University will get to use the footage as recruiting material.
“Pika pika,” Snooki said. “Pikachu!”
Yet the new contract upset Rapelye’s careful balance of the student body in an unexpected way.
“Because the cast of Jersey Shore often displays a shocking form of all-too-modern fashion called ‘nudity’,” she said through a sign language interpreter, adding that she had been unavailable for vocal comment in three years and had no intention of changing, “We decided to take action.”
To restore balance both temporal and tangible, the University’s new regulations, set to take effect on February 1, draw on the popular 80s and 90s nights regularly hosted by eating clubs.
“We’ve really listened to our students,” said Dean of Student Life Kathleen Deignan. “We know how much students enjoy these ‘blasts from the past’ and want to give them something even better. Instead of a night, this will be an eternity, and instead of the 1980s, this will be the 1580s.”
Under the new rules, students will be required to dress in exemplary Elizabethan style. For women, that means petticoats and waxed faces. For men, grand mustachios and pointy beards. For both, it means corsets.
The University will also host monthly balls featuring popular period dances such as the galliard and pavane, in which a group of girls would bunch up in a circle and move around, not unlike what can be found today at Tower Club. Very different parts of the body come into contact, Deignan noted, however.
“I’ve taken girls to the balls a lot of times,” said the Jersey Shore’s Vinny, “but never like this.”
Rarely has a University proposal met with such universal acclaim. The dress code has won approval from all sides of campus, including the Office of Sustainability, Alcohol Coalition, and the Dean of the College.
Trey Hugger ’12, president of the Princeton Sustainability Committee praised the changes, noting that so few stores sell the clothing required by the new regulations, that he will never again faint in the mall after seeing a gaggle of girls nearly collapsing under the weight of countless plastic bags bearing names from J.Jill to Anthropologie, which apparently prides itself on equating today’s “sophisticated woman” with poor spelling.
He said he hopes to see the number of plastic bags per mall trip drop from what he thinks is an average of “three or four hundred” to just one.
Hugger also noted the food and heat the University will save as a result of the dress code. Corsets constrict the waist, marginally decreasing the surface area of the body exposed to the air, which makes it more difficult for the body to lose heat. Hugger said that this could translate into as much as 0.3 cents of savings per student per year.
“The corsets will also serve as a tangible disincentive to eating a lot,” Hugger added.
To help communicate the environmental benefits of the dress code, Hugger said the Sustainability Committee will be launching a new awareness campaign by teaming up with MTV’s RoomRaiders. Any students who wish to opt out can e-mail ihatepolarbears@princeton.edu.
Tito Taller ’14, chair of the Alcohol Coalition Committee also supported the change, noting that it is extremely difficult to remove the odor from corsets.
“Besides, corsets take a long time to get on,” he said. “Students can have fun for hours helping each other put them on. It’s a safe, alcohol-free alternative to the Street.”
Cancer and Baboons
Administrators are also hopeful that the new dress code will improve academics at the University. The proposal was vigorously supported by Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel, who earlier this week released a new proposal requiring students to deflate their own grades.
“We’ve really listened to our students,” Malkiel said. “I know how unpopular grade deflation was, so we decided to end the policy.”
Malkiel is confident that the dress code will serve as a more than adequate replacement. Corsets tend to decrease the amount of air a person can take in during each breath, which Malkiel said would have “some considerable effect” on performance during oral examinations. Additionally, Malkiel hopes the new required clothing will be tight enough to make the composition of an exam essay a formidable exercise in dexterity.
“Though the University is always looking for new ways to challenge the student body and continue to provide an unparalleled intellectual experience, we are always here to assist students with their academic needs,” Malkiel said. “Corsets are a great way to help students meet their self-deflation goals.”
Malkiel seems to be building on the research of EEB Professor Norman Higrade, whose string of scholastic excellence continues after his well-received anti-global warming diatribe on Fox News and his more recent research linking increased rates of cancer to the consumption of baboon flesh. Higrade recently published a paper showing that a small waist is linked to a small GPA.
He was quick to respond to his critics, who say they cannot reproduce such a result.
“This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda,” Higrade said. “It’s the same people who tell you that global warming is happening, it’s the same people who tell you they’ve never eaten a baboon.”
Most Jersey Shore members also seemed to support Malkiel’s use of the corset.
“I think it’s a great idea to deflate your own GPA,” JWoww said. “Like, sometimes, you’re at the club, and you meet this great guy who you think is, like, big. And then you bring him home and he tells you his Guido Penile Augmenter is stuck on, and can you please deflate it for me.”
“I’m like, please,” she continued, “why can’t you just do it yourself?”
Attempts to explain the relevant meaning of the acronym were unsuccessful.
Scholars from the Woodrow Wilson School and Economics Departments also saw the new dress code as a way for the University to live up to its motto of “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.”
“Among all the turmoil of the financial sector and the near failure of GM lies a more subtle, more sinister economic tumor,” Wilson School professor Ira Goldman said. “It is the failing historical clothing industry.”
Goldman said he saw the dress code as a great way to use the University’s large endowment to stimulate the economy.
“We’ll be doing God’s work,” he added.
Other beneficiaries of the new clothing policy include Party City.
But will they fit?
Some students registered concern that the corset would cramp their style of individuality.
“One of the reasons I chose Princeton is that I knew they would give me the freedom to wear what I chose,” Henry Morton ’14 said. “Either J. Crew or Ralph Lauren.”
Morton argued that the new corset rules would hurt the campus’s diversity, saying that the freedom to choose what to wear was as fundamental a right as the freedom of choosing which eating club to bicker or which brand of hummus to purchase.
President Tilghman acknowledged those concerns, and was quick to lay them to rest.
“At Princeton, we always try to provide a diversity of student options,” President Tilghman said. “That’s why we have such a diverse group of students, a diverse set of eating options and a diverse palette of squirrels.”
“We’ve really listened to our students,” she continued, “so we will give each student a quota of six ‘casual days’ per academic year.” On those days, students may choose to wear either a collared shirt with the collar popped or khakis with a leather belt.
Other students voiced their disapproval of the constant presence of cameras that that the Jersey Shore crew would bring along with them. Many said that the University’s deal with MTV constituted a horrible breach of their privacy.
“The privacy of students is extremely important,” University spokeswoman Emily Aronson said. “Administrators take the privacy of students very seriously.”
“We’ve really listened to our students,” she added. “So unlike the camera in the Forbes computer lab, we will not be broadcasting the video to the entire Internet. We have bargained hard with Viacom to ensure that the video will only be available to MTV subscribers.”
And yet other students were worried about whether the Jersey Shore members would fit into campus culture at all.
“I’m scared I might not be cool enough to talk to Ronnie,” H. Atherton Maugham III said.
All of the Jersey Shore members, however, were excited to be coming to Princeton, especially Angelina, who agreed to rejoin the cast because of the opportunity the new season gave her to “drop out of college, as well.”
President Tilghman urged students not to worry.
“I think it’s obvious that they were made for Princeton,” she said. “They’re also colored orange and black.”
This article is part of The Daily Princetonian's annual joke issue. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.
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