As the 2022 school year has gotten off to a hot start, Whitman students have been suddenly possessed with the absolute certainty that someone, somehow, is going to fuck it up. 

Despite eventual failure, the fall semester has started without much trouble. The weather is cooling from the heat wave; Whitman has returned to the US News rankings; North Hall is incrementally less haunted and YikYak has become slightly less toxic than average. Altogether, Whitman appears to be on an upswing—a state of affairs, the student body agrees, will make somebody managing to screw it up all the more tragic. 

“Yeah, I’ve had a lot of fun so far,” said Cody Giblin, Class of 2024. “We haven’t had a massive COVID surge yet; my student loan debt was canceled and I’m doing pretty well in my classes so far! Obviously, it’s going to go disastrously wrong somehow, so I have to keep that in mind.”

“My bet is a bird attack,” continued Giblin, “or maybe swine flu. Swine flu’s been waiting in the wings for too long.”

Favorites for whoever may manage to cause the inevitable downfall of this school year have already hit the Whitman betting markets, including figures such as your professor who hasn’t published their syllabus yet, Sarah Bolton and the entire Whitman Board of Trustees. But the top favorite remains some random student somehow managing to fuck it up for everybody out of nowhere.

Despite the general consensus of eventual disaster, Whitman sources urge caution, predicting that maybe someone was only going to fuck everything up a little bit and not the whole way.