Generic State University Pivots to Dark Academia

Generic State University has been proudly upholding its mission to provide opportunities and build character in all students since its founding. Now, we turn our attention to the next frontier of education: joining the ranks of Dark Academia, which we are mostly sure we could define, if pressed.

We know that Generic State would be the first land-grant institution in Dark Academia. We bear little resemblance to the current member institutions: private, elite colleges and universities with a long history of elitism, classism, and general exclusivity. Nevertheless, we believe we have a lot to bring to the table.

And not just cows, although with our agricultural programs, we’ll be bringing those too.

ARCANE TRADITIONS

Generic State boasts several football traditions capable of whipping our students into a Bacchanalian frenzy: a catalog of three official fight songs written bespoke for the University over its century and a half, five common cheers, and the football team’s ten years of consistent walk-on music in Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse.”

At Generic State, it’s normal for crowds of tens of thousands of students, faculty, alums, or even mere fans to chant, scream, cry, and occasionally bleed while exploited youths risk their bodies and minds in ritual violence to sate the bloodlust of their watchers. Surely this must be Dark Academia somehow.

And not all of our traditions are around sports. Our campus is divided by an interstate, and a single bridge joins the two halves. For decades, students have convened in the center of the bridge, joined hands, and jumped in unison to feel it bounce in resonance—a sure sign of structural instability.

This is both a potent metaphor for how our students’ carelessness leaves the world more precarious for the next generation, and a planned capital investment deferred for construction in three consecutive five-year plans.

SECRET SOCIETIES

Generic State has more students involved in Greek organizations than several current Dark Academia institutions have in their entire student body. We believe these more than fulfill the criteria regarding both violence and hedonism.

Furthermore, these fraternities create lifelong bonds between students who may never even meet, but will provide housing, employment opportunities, legal assistance, financial crimes, and abetting after the fact to their brothers without question.

THE AESTHETIC

Okay, we admit, this one is a stretch. Candlelit rooms? Against the fire code. Crowded libraries with plush armchairs stuffed into every square foot not filled with moldering bookshelves? Against the fire code. Velvet drapes? Also against the fire code, unless they’re backed with flame-retardant material.

For a general creeping sense of dread, we have a preponderance of eerie staircases that, when students aren’t rushing between classes, get empty and quiet enough to make you wonder if anything truly exists outside the stairwell; if anything has ever really existed; if the only real things in the world are the brutalist concrete beneath your feet, the worn-out textbooks disintegrating in your hands, and the sourceless echoes filling your ears and your mind and your soul.

You may worry that ADA-compliant elevators would negate the whole vibe of the stairs, but they’re almost always out of service.

CLASS WARFARE

Generic State is particularly proud of our traditions of doublethink, in which we tout our stated mission to make education accessible to all while simultaneously celebrating the clear financial winners of education (i.e., not English majors).

As of this writing, 73 percent of buildings on campus are named after wealthy alums who became wealthy donors. We take great pride in this legacy of reminding our students that we only care about their accomplishments if those accomplishments give us money.

Despite our football team having functionally no accomplishments in the past fifty years, its coach is our home state’s highest-paid public employee with an eight-figure salary. In contrast, the university’s current rate for adjunct faculty begins at a one-time stipend of $1,000 per credit hour (non-benefits-eligible).

And let’s not even get into graduate student stipends.

ANCIENT SINS

Our initial founding dates back to the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, which granted funding to public state universities by selling federal land stolen from Native American tribes in what has been called, by people who are objectively correct, an imperialist genocide.

While Generic State acknowledges that secrecy and conspiracies surrounding an institution’s ancient sins are a hallmark of Dark Academia, we humbly point out that other institutions have to keep their atrocities secret to avoid notice. We have several relevant informational displays, multiple pages on the official university website, and a boilerplate Ancient Sin Acknowledgment for faculty to use, and yet we still manage to maintain widespread ignorance.

If systemic violence is insufficient to meet the requirements, we are happy to provide records documenting a long history of deeply charged emotional and/or physical attacks encouraged, or at least purposely ignored, by our administration. The past ten years alone have seen eighteen lawsuits over the school’s handling of sexual harassment. These statistics put us well within peer institutions’ benchmarks.

Overall, Generic State University and Polytechnic Institute is proud of our heritage, from the impossible-to-find memorial plaques in the campus’s slave graveyard to our unstated but consistent refusal to back our faculty’s freedom of political speech. We believe we are an excellent fit for the Dark Academia cohort and the perfect choice to begin expanding Dark Academia into land-grant institutions, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Please enjoy the complimentary plushie of our University’s mascot. If you can figure out which population its stereotypical caricature targets, please let us know; it’s been a topic of ongoing debate.