As a humor writer for the Whitman College Pioneer (we’d love input on a less-racist name change, by the way), I am a vociferous proponent for making fun of the Whitman student body. Every day, I am bombarded with potential jokes about the various absurdities of living in this Birkenstoked hive mind, so I was disappointed to see a lack of quality jabs at Whitman in the WWU paper. Making jokes about Whitman is both a valuable creative exercise and a public service, since we are notorious for our unofficial mascot, the Fighting Egregiously Coddled (Wo)Man Child. In a hopefully non-patronizing manner, I’d like to offer up some suggestions for the WWU paper to join me in my crusade of taking the egos of Whitman students down a few notches every week.

1. Our climbing gym has monogrammed Patagonia fleeces for the staff. Honestly, I’m not sure how that’s not an above-the-fold headline every week.
2. We take every opportunity, real or imagined, to demonstrate that we are the smartest people in the room. Just recently at a frat party, I was asked about my thoughts on Catherine Mackinnon’s feminist critique of “Roe v. Wade” and I reflected seriously and deliberately on the life choices that had brought me to that point.
3. Seriously, we think we are so, so smart.
4. Have you seen how many people walk around barefoot on Whitman campus? Is this some kind of radical political statement? Only at Whitman, in a sea of wealthy, educated liberals, would foregoing shoes become a mode of separating yourself from the herd.
5. We take ourselves so seriously that we call our bizarre amalgam of sculptures on campus a “sculpture garden.” In related news, U.S. News released a new list of colleges ranked by pretentiousness. Rumor has it that Whitman topped the list with a score of 5/5 eye rolls.
6. We try and fail spectacularly to pretend that we aren’t rich when the vast majority of us are, in fact, walking $100 bill relics from the tech startup era. It’s tough to fine-tune a grungy college kid aesthetic while simultaneously driving our brand-new Subarus across campus instead of walking five minutes, or claiming we’re “so poor” when our parents wrote our $60,000 tuition check as soon as we emerged from the womb.
7. We can’t possibly be bothered to actually be politically active, so we take up the most inane political causes to rally around and give them purposely vague and confusing names like “divestment” or “transparency” or “intersectional feminism.”