Plans have recently been approved to allow a new vendor to begin selling large sheets of bubble wrap for students to wrap around themselves in an effort to protect their fragile self esteems from the difficult conversations that lie ahead in class discussions of race and gender.

The new precautions come just in time for the beginning of Encounters, in which first years will soon be engaging in texts such as Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” W.E.B. Dubois’s “The Souls of Black Folk,” and other works that may foster discussion offensive to those first-year students with white penises. Students will be able to purchase enough bubble wrap to encase their bodies and various intersecting privileges, waddle off to their classrooms, and be sufficiently counterproductive to the goals of the Encounters department.

“We eased them into the curriculum with ‘Frankenstein,’ a text with white male protagonists, but we want to make sure students are sufficiently prepared, emotionally and physically, for the future bruises that may come to the egos that society has tirelessly worked to inflate,” said one Encounters professor.

The venture is headed by two Whitman alumni, John Marcus and Joe Narcissa, who realized the market for the emotional and physical cushioning when they were victims of countless articulate and reasonable criticisms of their privileged perspectives in various Encounters texts. In a recent interview, Marcus and Narcissa told The Pioneer, “We’re just trying to look out for the white men.” 

The best part? All bubble wrap expenses can be charged to students’ Whitman account so they can forward the emails from the Finance Office to their parents and hope Mom and Dad don’t ask for a detailed invoice.

Though the initial plans approved only enough bubble wrap to cushion the egos of the first year class, the Administration-with-a-capital-A has plans to expand the availability of Marcus and Narcissa’s services to the entire Whitman student body. Bubble wrap will be available not only to those offended that four entire non-white non-male authors made it into the Encounters curriculum, but also to those unlucky upperclassmen who ended up in a Gender Studies or Race and Ethnic studies class to fill distribution requirements.

The plans don’t stop there. Marcus and Narcissa also have also proposed mandatory faculty singing lessons to start staffing an on-call lullaby service to those students particularly bruised by the day’s horizon broadening. Professors will rock students to sleep with dreams of sugar plums and full participation grades. Scheduling for this program is not expected to be a problem because time has been freed up for the professors since the Qur’an was removed from the syllabus. 

As one member of the Board of Trustees told The Pioneer, “any and all of our favorite students and highest donors should have the opportunity to feel safe. College is about growth, but only the kind of growth you’re comfortable with.”