In preparation for the resumption of classes at Upper Metolius State College of Engineering and Poetry, floors have been swept and desks have been varnished. The dust from the floorsweeping, made shiny by the evaporated gases from the varnish, has been binned. “Nothing wasted” would be the theme applied to that week in retrospect, according to Dr. Brent Woodley, Acting Dean and Dean of Acting.

“The spirit of efficiency has always been a theme of the life of this institution of mostly higher learning,” Woodley told the press. “That’s why we have the faculty come a week early for team-building exercises which also get the campus in shape for the students. For example,” he went on, “the addition of E. Quill Lateral to the math department this term has revolutionized our hall- and classroom-mopping strategies. Using sophisticated mathematical modeling, Quill, as he likes to be called because it is his name, applied highly theoretical geometrical principles to aggregate and analyze the mop-work that has been dutifully recorded over the years in order to facilitate just such efforts at improvement as we are promoting in 2025.”

Asked about the results of the study, Woodley reported that the best approach to dust moppage was, “in a word, ‘back-and-forth.’”

These are the kind of breakthroughs one can expect from a college that fearlessly questions the norm and constantly seeks improvement.

Woodley anticipates campus visits from street-sweeper operators from every county in Oregon. “They’ll want to know if the UMSCEP B&F method can be successfully modified and applied to street sweeping,” he said. “We’re looking at booking a two-week seminar to explore the possibilities. We’ve lined up several guest-speakers, including the renowned Abercrombie ‘Abe’ Goolis, Head Janitor at Montezuma.”

Spokesman readers who stay current with a subscription to Wall 2 Wall, the academic journal for sweepers, will recognize Goolis as the guy who developed the first two-headed hall-mop. This clever innovation doubled the recumbent dust reduction in those hallowed halls only a couple decades ago.

Elsewhere on campus, the preparations for spring term are moving ahead. Woodley reports that the lawsuit filed by the Power-Point people, which claimed that UMSCEP was flagrantly misusing their copyright-protected two-word, hyphenated name, was settled out of court. Which is not entirely true. This reporter witnessed the negotiations between the plaintiffs and the defendants near the net during an on-campus tennis game.

The Power-Point side argued that their name was used extensively in the promotional materials for an all-college flint-knapping competition-exhibition. Woodley, in his usual role as Acting Dean and Dean of Acting, pointed out that they used not a hyphen, as falsely claimed, but a semi-dash, which is longer than a hyphen.

The Power-Pointers found it impossible to positively prove their point, deemed the suit pointless, and withdrew the suit provided Woodley would refrain from using their trademark and reframe his promotion products proactively.

“No more Power-Point, period,” Woodley pronounced as they shook hands and disbanded.

As the interrupted tennis game resumed at love-30, Woodley realized there were plans to be made for the annual Mid-Winter, Middle-Aged, Violets-and-Valentines Dinner-Dance and Auction. He returned to his office.

He issued a memo requiring the Power-Point machinery to be removed from all the classrooms and laboratories on campus. He ordered 15 gallons of chalkboard paint from Sherwin-Williams, hired Sonoma-Williams to recommend color-shades from the casual-educational spectrum, and hired out-of-work bakery-and-pastry dough-rollers to do the application. The front wall of every classroom would become a good, old-fashioned chalkboard.

From now on, all on-campus lectures will be box-stock chalk-talks, fact-filled and free of falsified flummery.

E. Quill Lateral took issue with the plan vis-à-vis his lecture hall, insisting that all four walls be made available. “Ours is a complex world,” he asserted. “Maybe uber-complex. Maybe ultra-uber-complex. We need room for bigger equations. I need to work back-and-forth from one wall to the other.” Woodley approved the exception.