Tag Archives: fundy college week

education

College Week: Crime and Punishment

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No matter how much they would like to, the deans at Fundy U can’t get away with using corporal punishment on the students. In lieu of lashings, however, the administration has devised a litany of fiendishly clever punishments suitable to fit any crime real or imagined.

Demerits

Demerits can be thought of as the currency of sin at Fundy U. Want to skip your room job? Listen to non-approved music? Miss a class?  You’ll pay for each offence out of your store of demerits. Take care, however, hit 150 and you’ll be on a plane back home to mom and dad faster than you can say “arbitrary rule system.”  Demerits are also an easy way for the admin to gauge your spiritual health. They’ll even send a helpful letter to your parents letting them know how you did the semester before.

Socialing

Being “socialed” is a punishment reserved for those who have committed a crime of passion such as talking to a girl in the Library, shaking a boy’s hand, or using the wrong elevator.  While enduring this punishment, you will not be able to speak to, write to, sit next to, or breath the same air as a member of the opposite sex. If you should be so unfortunate to be socialed, you’ll soon learn who your real friends are — they’re the ones who will leave their own significant others to come keep you company at dinner so you don’t have to eat alone.

Campusing

There is an odd sort of cognitive dissonance to this particular punishment. Having spent thousands of dollars in advertising to convince students that their campus is the happiest place on earth, the administration then decides that the worst punishment they can imagine short of expulsion is to confine students to that selfsame little slice of heaven. In addition to not being able to leave, no campused student may talk to or room with any other campused student. This gives the powers-that-be the ability break up groups of friends that they believe are a bad element.

Shadowing

When a Fundy U student has sinned unto death and is having their fate decided by the deans office they spent their time as the shadow of a floor leader.  This means that they will follow everywhere and have no communication with anybody except for the deans office and their current guardian. Being shadowed at Fundy U is the kiss of death. In a very real sense the shadowed student is dead to his classmates.  They cannot speak to him, look at him, or even acknowledge his presence.  Even attempting to say “goodbye” can result in the expulsion of any student who commits this defiant act.

Call Slips

One of the most terrifying moments at Fundy U is the moment after opening your mailbox when you spot that green square of paper that requests your presence in the Dean’s office. This almost never ends well because the deans are masters of…

Interrogations

If you’ve ever been repeatedly pulled out of bed after midnight and given hours of interrogation in the freezing cold by a power hungry Fundy U Residence Manager in an attempt to make you confess,  please  know that you are not alone. The tactics used in attempt to get students to make  a confession or turn in their friends would make any intelligence service proud. Fundy U deans will divide and conquer, attempt to use guilt and coercion, promise to cut deals, and (if all else fails) outright lie in order to extract the answers they want from a student. You don’t get a judge and jury. You certainly don’t get a last cigarette.

Somehow this regiment of shame and terror in enforcing the ever-changing and often unwritten body of rules never makes it into the glossy brochures or the sales pitches from traveling singing groups. At Fundy U you are always guilty until proven innocent and suspected of evil just by virtue being alive. caveat emptor.

education

College Week: Love and Marriage

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If you’ve ever heard someone use the words “God’s will” in a pickup line, chances are you went to Fundy U.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a ministerial student in possession of a diploma from Fundy U, must be in want of a wife. For all the jokes about women coming to a fundy college in pursuit of their MRS degree,  there is a great deal of genuine fear among fundamentalist parents that if their child goes off to a secular university they may end up unequally yoked to a Presbyterian. This is a fate to be avoided at all costs.

With the incredible pressure to find a spouse, dating at Fundy U is as serious as it is ubiquitous. Every date is a potential mate, after all, and the  mad rush to the altar demands that any interaction between the sexes may be defined as “a date.”

Borrowing a pencil in class? You may need to stop and “define the relationship” with that person first.

Sitting next to someone in church? You’re as good as engaged even if you don’t actually know them.

Eating dinner alone with a member of the opposite sex? It’s time to start picking out the names of your first six children.  I hear Jack is a popular one.

Other opportunities for dating include dating outings with all the rapture of “hand holding” games; Artists Series wherein you get all dressed up and listen to someone scream in Italian for an hour; or best of all trips to the dating parlor complete with hours of optical intercourse.

With college coming to an end and hormones running high, many graduates of Fundy U will be married within a few weeks of getting their diploma. The sad reality is that many will end up divorced as it finally occurs to them that maybe a date to Vespers wasn’t the best way to get to know who their mate was in the real world outside those hallowed halls.

Of course, compared to the alternative of having the type of fundy parents who insist that they be allowed to chose your spouse for you, maybe dating at Fundy U isn’t so bad after all…

education

College Week: Mandated Spirituality

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BJU Prayer Group

At Fundy U it is not only encouraged that the students do their good works before men to be seen of them, it’s downright required.

Chapel is on the beginning of the extra spiritual walk that is demanded from the students at fundamentalists colleges. For some students “Christian Service” outreach will be a requirement, for everyone it will be very, very strongly suggested. As a reward for fulfilling the Great Commission by doing skits for neighborhood children and yelling at drunks, your collegian (think fundy fraternity) may receive points towards a trophy. This accolade will be awarded with great ceremony before the entire student body to congratulate these students who are evidently a little less unprofitable than the other servants. Blow that trumpet a little louder. I don’t think enough people are looking yet.

Students at Fundy U will also be attending an evening prayer meeting with their roommates whether they like it or not. At some institutions the unwritten mandate goes so far as to state that someone in the room must actually be praying for 10 out of the allotted 15 minutes. Evidently God takes the same attitude toward 8 1/2 minute prayers as He does toward 9 1/2 percent tithing. This time limit presents a problem since it only leaves 5 minutes for roommates to give competing testimonies of how many people got saved on their outreach that afternoon.

There will also be required Bible classes for every student in which students will learn important spiritual truths such as why Rahab was wrong to lie when she tried to save the spies and how if you turn your head sideways and squint you can see the shape of a cross being formed by the furniture in the Hebrew tabernacle. For all classes students will need to purchase approximately 1,983 3×5 cards in preparation for taking KJV Bible verse quizzes. Even Algebra classes may have a verse quiz from time to time. Be prepared.

Work for the night is coming and be sure to document your efforts well. It’s not like you have a choice and there may be a trophy in it for you.

picture of BJU girl’s prayer group courtesy Life magazine.

education

College Week: Chapel

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If you have a Pavlovian response of standing to your feet every time you hear the opening notes of the Doxology, chances are you went to Fundy U.

Since mandatory attendance to regular weekly church services don’t provide nearly enough time for indoctr…er…edification, Fundy U also provides its students with the opportunity to hear daily sermons from whatever preachers the president happens to be friends with this week. Many students also know this daily occurance by another name: “naptime.”

Since chapel services are not usually broadcast to the public like other services and have few visitors in attendance, it’s a perfect opportunity for the fundy preacher du jour to unleash a holy torrent of full bore crazy upon his listeners. Horrific tales of death and dismemberment? Check. Stories about the masturbation habits of the speaker’s teenage son? Yes. (Oh, how I wish that one weren’t true!) Insinuations that most of his listeners are probably Satan-worshiping whores who only came to a fundamentalist college to corrupt his offspring who are the only three good children left on the planet? Yea, Verily.

But amongst the endless alliterated instructions on Finding God’s Mysteriously Lost Will For Your Life (without which you’re totally screwed) and warnings about Amnon’s friend Jonadab lies a much subtler purpose in chapel services — they are the most direct conduit for the administration to use a kind of spiritual coercion on the behavior of their students. A single uncontested voice speaking with conviction is the perfect medium for authoritarian re-education.

When a pastor delivers a message from behind the sacred desk at least some percentage of the student body will take him seriously and go carry out his bidding. All that remains for the administration to determine is what action they want from the student body today. Whether it’s a carefully constructed message on why God would never, ever want you to leave Fundy U, a drive for votes in a local election, or a plea for students to turn in their roommates to the deans office for real or imagined wrongs, by a skillful use of the chapel speaker the leadership can be sure that they will get a decent return on their time investment each week.

Those who manage to sleep in Jesus instead of listening are the lucky ones.

education

College Week: Watchful Watchers Who Watch

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If you’re a person who does not enjoy having your every move scrutinized, analyzed, and documented a fundamentalist college campus is not the place for you.

Not only does Fundy U have an army of deans, deans assistants, residence managers, and dorm monitors, they also see to it that each room has its very own prayer leader or assistant leader. The most important five minutes of your entire college year is the moment when you first meet your room leader and find out how “cool” they are — in other words how likely they are to report you to the powers that be for any small infraction.

Educational buildings on campus are assigned floor monitors and chaperons as well to make sure that boys and girls aren’t dilly dallying around the stairwells or passing notes in the computer labs. Chaps will also patrol the outside walkways looking for girls who aren’t sitting modestly enough or guys with their shirts untucked. Secular colleges may have cameras to catch potential thieves and rapists, Fundy U uses them to catch any misguided fundy Lothario who seeks to steal a smooch by the snack machines.

Off-campus movements are monitored as well. There’s the sign-in and sign-out mechanisms, the list of approved locations you can visit, and the ever present army of college employees who are just walking around the mall aimlessly on a Saturday morning for no apparent reason other than spotting students out of dress code or talking to the opposite sex in (gasp) Sears.

If you still look around nervously after you walk out of the “Entrance” door at the supermarket and half-wonder if someone is going to jump out of the bushes and give you a demerit slip, you probably went to a fundamentalist college.