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Occurred: Fall 2007 | Written: Fall 2009
I was taking this asinine management course where the teacher was invisible and you did group work to justify the course’s existence.
In one session we were actively encouraged to enter a contest our school wins every year, and then brags about winning to the alumni. How does our school win every year? By default.
That’s right, that class consisted of thinking about entries for a contest we would win if we submitted a piece of paper that simply said, “@MyBalls“.
I started to openly question why I was putting myself into further debt for this program. The other classes were much of the same. Then one student, Dudemeister, pushed me over the edge and packing for home.
You know that person who walks into class, and just by the look of them, you know they’re not going to contribute? The person who sucks their classmates blood like a teeny-bopper vampire sucks blood from a spineless female protagonist that makes poor life decisions? Yep. That’s our boy.
Trooper and I gave Dudemeister the name after the Scrubs joke because the name fit his douchey behavior.
After a semester of avoiding Dudemeister’s suck circus, I was assigned to work with him for the final project.
For our project, Dudemeister decided to make up, what I thought, was an elaborate lie about being related to a former famous tribal leader. Go ahead, prove him wrong.
Our group consisted of Dudemeister, myself, and a few international students. I can’t spell their actual names. I’m also not going to refer to their American names because giving us an “American name” to call them by is condescending to us and demeaning to them.
How would you like it if your name was warrior (pronounced jan-shyr in Mandarin Chinese) but everyone called you Kevin?
The international students got a pass on everything and most of them, including the three in our group, exploited this as much as possible. Our three also didn’t do much beyond consume my limited oxygen supply.
You might be thinking, “Brandon, oxygen is plentiful, what are you talking about?” To which I answer, “Shut up, Mr. Science! It’s my story, and Dudemeister wields a mighty club made of stupidity and breathes through the mouth, making oxygen scarce in his presence.”
Dudemeister was appointed the group’s leader because, unlike me, he doesn’t call out the international students when they suddenly don’t understand anything. This always occurs right as they’re not getting their way.
I suggested a leader for the report who actually had sources we could use, you know, like Hitler, but Dudemeister kept pushing for his alleged ancestor.
I suggested other, more reasonable choices, and was skeptical we could succeed with this leader because there wasn’t much information available.
Dudemeister promised us all the information we would need and none of the work. I immediately stopped going to group meetings. Whether Dudemeister was related to the leader or not, something was up, and I wanted no part of it.
For all I knew, Dudemeister did a paper on this leader before or pulled one out from a filing cabinet in a frat basement.
All because I’m riding the train that’s about to murder academic innocence doesn’t mean I have to stay on it.
If you think I’m being unfair to the international students: I was friends with many of them. Particularly the ones that actually needed and wanted help interacting with Americans, and those who didn’t want to pretend they were resource room material because they came from a different country.
Every. Single. One. Of these students told me: “We just need a Master’s from an American institution. It doesn’t matter what it’s in, and this one is perfect because it’s useless. So why put any work in? We have bigger problems. We came here to interact with Americans and the school stuck us all together in one residence hall and our program is made up of other students … from our country! This is bullshit!”
That’s right. I taught my global friends the phrase, “bullshit”. You’re welcome Earth.
This is from more than half of the students in the program, saying the degree was useless. What little faith I had in my future degree was inching closer to a rest home with each of their words.
Naturally, none of the promised information Dudemeister claimed he had come in. He gave us three links, one of them to the leader’s Wikipedia page, the other two? Useless.
If my faith in the degree was going to a rest home, he was already there, waiting with a pillow.
For his section of the paper, the history of the leader, Dudemeister plagiarized the Wikipedia entry. I know. The Wikipedia page was all I had to work with.
Having a paper with my name on it, that someone cheated on, made me madder than a menstruating badger.
We inched closer to our group presentation. I had no information to finish my section, so I went on for three pages about how much better Asia is after America got there.
Before I was avoiding group meetings, the ones I did go to went like this:
Dudemeister: Am I not awesome?
International students in unison: Yes. Very awesome.
Brandon: So, uh … yeah, I can’t find any sources for this leader or for my part of the project, and we really need to talk about citing your sources.
International students and Dudemeister: *All three stare blankly at Brandon*
Dudemeister: Let’s hear it for how awesome I am!
But just in case Dudemeister was related to our leader, I avoided him after I sent my section in. I think the word “libel” and phrase “character defamation” can describe my section of the paper.
When it came time for the actual presentation, I talked about how Dudemeister’s relative was a mass murderer that sodomized everyone, and that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. After I finished, I said to the class Dudemeister was a liar and plagiarized Wikipedia. I then turned to Dudemeister and said, “Fuck you. I don’t care if I fail” and walked out. This was a course on leadership. I should have got an A for that alone.
Since we went to the same bars, after the “incident”, I told my friends, ”I’m not going. Captain Caveman might be there to beat me with his extra-retard strength”.
I met with the professor and told him: “Look. I’m not ok with having my name on something that has been plagiarized. You can see here and here where it’s the exact same sentences from the Wikipedia entry without any citations”.
His response: “I’ll read the paper very carefully after it has been submitted.”
Translation: “If you haven’t noticed, I’m running on auto-pilot. They don’t pay me enough to care.”
The professor encouraged me to meet with the group to get the project handed in. No paper. No investigation, so out of morbid curiosity and hopeful vindication, I met with them one last time.
In one of those moments I wish I had a recording device, Dudemeister said I was right and there wasn’t a lot of sources because people wouldn’t have known what happened unless they were there.
He then followed up that doozy with, “I just put down what was on there [Wikipedia] because all I had was what my Grandmother told me.“
“Unless they were there.”
“What. My. Grandmother. Told Me.”
He’s going to get away with it!
I sat and talked with our group for a few minutes, chewing on that bit of information before I felt violently ill. I excused myself and walked into the middle of the academic quad, dropped my books, and stared off into the sky. The scorecard was going to read: Dudemeister 1, Brandon 0, and there was nothing I could do about it. If spontaneous human combustion was possible and fueled by rage, it would have happened there.
Am I to believe for my next assignment, I can tell people I’m the biological father of Michael Jackson’s son, provide first hand information from Elizabeth Taylor that would go unquestioned, and still get an A?
According to the professor: Yes, yes I could.
After Dudemeister suffocated my belief in the value of this degree, the professor organized the funeral and gave him an A for the eulogy.
I immediately withdrew from the program. The degree was, as my international friends would tell you, bullshit. And as Groucho Marx once said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”, or in this case, Dudemeister as a member.
Coda
A few years later I am returning to this school to finish the program. With the way the economy is, I wanted a backup plan. I’m hopeful they passed a restriction on clubs made of stupid, but you never know.
