New Freshman Seminar takes students to Mar-a-Lago for fall break

The following content is purely satirical and entirely fictional.

The University’s First-Year Seminar Program provides the opportunity for first-year students to acclimate to the university experience and delve deeper into a particular topic. Many of these seminars include free trips all over the globe in order to get up close and personal with their material.

A new seminar titled “Fantastic Fascists and Where to Find Them” was introduced this fall by Professor Dick Tater. Last week, the class made their way to Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach resort owned by overlord Donald J. Trump, in order to further their search.

Originally, the class was scheduled to travel to Washington, D.C., to walk through the city with binoculars in hopes of spotting budding fascists through the windows of government buildings. However, with the current government shutdown, Professor Tater pivoted the enriching trip to the place in the United States with the most optimal intersection of fun and fascists.

When asked about the trip, Professor Tater stated, “It was better than you could possibly imagine. Once I showed the resort staff pictures of my buddy Pete Hegseth and me playing pong in the Cottage backyard, they immediately curated all-inclusive arrangements for all sixteen of the students in my seminar!”

At Mar-a-Lago, the students’ activities include swimming in the pool, doubles tennis matches against Vice President Vance and his dignity, and basking in the “sun substitute” that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. installed on the island as part of his “Clean UV” campaign.

One of the students, James Little ’29, said, “I honestly joined the class because I thought it would somehow be related to Harry Potter, so I was pretty excited when I saw a witch that might have also been the head of the Department of Homeland Security.”

Over the course of the week, students were given an assignment to discover and write short profiles of as many fascists as they could in their allotted time. The students then presented their findings to the rest of the class on their last day before returning to campus. Presentations lasted over twelve hours, and many of these first-years are returning to campus with their theses already completed.

The First-Year Seminar Program plans to feature this investigative work in an exposition within the next few weeks, and they anticipate allowing Professor Tater to repeat this seminar in the future, or at least the next three years.

Francesca Volkema '28 is an associate Humor editor who is always on the lookout for friendly neighborhood fascists. She can be reached at nr9348@princeton.edu.