‘A small, mid-western university, Prairie College, is renowned for two things: producing well-equipped students of agriculture and a growing monument to failure that spreads across its expansive campus dubbed ‘Academic Rigor Mortis’ (or, sometimes, the ARM). In practice, the ARM restates a situation made relatively clear in the institution’s public documents- that the success of their small number of graduates is achieved at the cost of the large percentage of students that fail or drop-out. The academic targets of Prairie College are impossibly demanding and students are expected to fulfill physical farming duties in addition to coursework. The administration has leaned into this trend, creating something that shares more aspects with an obstacle course than it does with any other accredited educational program in the country. Its workload has been deemed psychologically damaging by several local psychiatrists who describe failed students as ‘irrevocably broken.’
‘Academic Rigor Mortis’ is the result of a particularly cruel policy, one that states that ‘Prairie College’ will not release documents for transfer before a student buries her completed physical coursework on campus, erecting a small headstone that displays their proposed (and unfinished) thesis to mark the lot. The ARM, then, is a field sown with failure and failure grows there, the paper and ink leaching into the earth and creating a dark chemical shadow.
‘Prairie College’s’ founding documents famously refer to its ideal graduates as ‘enlightened farmers’ and famously digress into something like a summons for a singular being: ‘The Enlightened Farmer.’ The school’s tightening filter, it’s suggested, will someday result in its final graduating class- a class of one. This student will end the ARM’s decay and, perhaps, the punishing educational cycle of the institution from which it extends.’
There was a time when I thought I may have wanted to be a farmer. I would tend the garden in the backyard and read books about the end of the world. Looking out over the ‘ARM,’ I wonder how long we’ve been preparing for disaster. Humanity is bracing itself for an apocalypse and the end-times are crowded with prophecies. The longer we draw this out, the stranger the world will become.
-traveler
