Academics Get Cronked
Web humor spews out of the subject of college, from CollegeHumor’s prank wars to PartySchoolTexts.com to fake Facebook college groups, but rarely does a funny site poke fun at the institutions themselves. Rife with administration bureaucracy and run by self-proclaimed intellectuals, colleges and universities are surely worth a jab for being the squarish bookworms of society.
Enter The Cronk of Higher Education, a satirical news site about ridiculous issues in higher education, overblown academic conferences and fake intern/slave-wanted advertisements. In short, it’s The Onion with a PhD in post-post-modernist structuralism in Beowulf. The movie.
Fake article topics range from tech-savvy colleges that admit students via Evite and college fairs that draw 3,000 parents … and zero students. From revered professors emerita to jaded school administration staff to the broke PhD going on a 6th year of candidacy, The Cronk sheds a lighter, more ironic light on academic culture than the iron gates of higher ed usually allow through.
“I daydream about someone taking one of our articles to a staff meeting in order to ask ‘Do we act like this?’ ” said Cronk founder and author Leah Wescott, the pen name of a seasoned academic employee somewhere out in universityland. “We’re hoping to provide a safe way for [academic] professionals to look in the mirror. We also throw in some gratuitous stories about helicopter parents and millennial students so we can all feel superior.”
(helicopter parents - stage moms who write their kids’ college essays)
(millennial — Generation Y, or people born in the 80s, 90s and 2000s)
Sincerity aside, The Cronk has snark down to a perfectly-crossed t. The name itself is a play on words based on the well-established Chronicle of Higher Education, the self-proclaimed leading “source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators.” The Cronk proclaims differently, per a succinct mission statement:
The Cronk of Higher Education is a satirical publication hellbent on generating intelligent dialogue and healthy laughs about the world of college and universities.
*Disclaimer
Sometimes it works.
Sometimes it doesn’t.**Another Disclaimer
This website is a work of satire. Names, characters, settings, businesses and incidents portrayed are not to be taken seriously. It’s humor! Items submitted to CronkNews for publishing will be used at the sole discretion of the editors. All rights reserved.
Noting that the site’s primary readers are the butt of the jokes themselves, Wescott hasn’t yet encountered too many hurt feelings from those parodied in the often outlandish articles. “So far, we’ve steered clear of haters, but it’s only a matter of time before they come gunning for us,” predicts Wescott. “If you’ve ever read comment threads on Internet education blogs, they can become absolutely vicious.”
And they are. Just yesterday, a New York Times article titled “Want a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private College” sparked many long winded, verbose, book-length, pedantic, overly-wordy comments opening with such harsh jabs as “Admissions officers are idiots.” Ouch. Perhaps Wescott would frame the whole shebang as “Logg State Univ. Study Finds New Cause for Irritable Bowel Syndrome in Marginalized Populations with Large Vocabularies.” Or perhaps I may work on my titling skills before trying to submit an article to The Cronk.
The good-natured ability to laugh at oneself is at The Cronk’s core, especially when it comes to short fuses and long CVs. I’m eager to see how wider audiences will respond as the site gains more traction on the Web.
Here are some of my top Cronk picks:
Staff Member Marries the Rules in Campus Chapel
(Because if something’s written down, it must be very important.)
CronkNews Seeks Summer Intern
(Salary competitive with other unpaid intern positions, free instant coffee and free toilet paper. 2-ply!)
A call for conference program proposals about a wide range of topics, including: diversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, GLBT diversity, generational diversity, diverse diversity…
(Did I mention they want diversity?)
Perhaps The Cronk won’t go viral with the intensity of CollegeHumor, and perhaps the humor is a bit high-brow and pedantic in itself, as many undergraduate students may not be familiar with the world of academic conferences, for example. But if The Cronk is spreading some eyebrow-raising humor to the curmudgeon that is often the face of higher learning, I’m all for it.
