Written by Marco Ovies, Arts Editor
On Friday, SFU’s incoming president Joy Johnson announced her plans to shut down SFU’s Department of History. The university hosted a Town Hall in Images Theatre for students to discuss the future of the school’s history programs.
“Who cares about history?” Johnson pointed out to the crowd, to raucous applause. “It already happened! It’s over! What’s done is done!”
Students were vocal in supporting Johnson’s announcement, joining in a chant of “Liberty Bell! Disappointing and dumb!” throughout the assembly. Some students even feel that the department staff will benefit from being ousted.
“These profs act all upset, but secretly they really want things shaken up. We can all tell,” says Hank Balarmey, a first year student in attendance. “Don’t believe it? Take literally any history class ever and see if they have any fresh conversational material. Those history people think they do — but they don’t. They’re literally studying the history of history now . . . pretty soon they’re going to run out of excuses to keep going.
“They are starving for literally anything new to happen and nothing could be better than unemployment.”
Despite Balarmey’s assurances, however, faculty appeared truly off-put by Johnson’s announcements.
“SFU is acting like President Hoover during the Great Depression,” said Dr. Blank, history professor at SFU. “They just don’t give a dam.” Blank spent the Town Hall stabbing his Caesar salad to the rhythm of “Rasputin” by Boney M., before storming out in protest to one of his dingy 5000-level tutorial rooms in the AQ.
SFU’s Department of History is infamous for starting in 1965 as an SFSS club, meeting weekly to reminisce over the “good old days” in high school. Eventually, they ran out of grudges to loudly pretend to have gotten over, and quickly moved on to their elementary school days, their toddler years, and their babyhoods. Upon arriving at throwbacks to water breaking, the history department was born, in search of ever more things in the past to dwell on.
In fact, in a final tribute to the department’s roots, SFU encourages history majors and minors to see Academic Advising, where they can have “HIST 000: Peaking In High School” added to their transcripts as course credit to satisfy all remaining graduation requirements.
