By Nathan Schmidt
This spring, Fairfield University has announced a new financial initiative entitled “Red Stag,” where students are required to pay a large volume of human blood to the school as part of their tuition. The initiative, inspired by mounting deficits of spiritual suffering at the university, will allow Fairfield students to understand the human cost of academic progress.
For the academic year 2019-2020, the tuition and fees at Fairfield University are estimated to total approximately $49,500, or more than three times the tuition of the University of Connecticut. This tuition rate, which logically costs about $200,000 over a four-year education, is typically paid in full by students who expect to make major returns in the world of business upon graduation. But now, these same students will also be required to pay twenty gallons of freshly extracted human blood to the university each year, either poured upon the stones of the Donnarumma outdoor theater or spilled before the legendary bronze icon of the Fairfield stag.
“It’s not that infeasible,” said Professor Jim Languedoc Halsen in the School of Business. “Have you ever seen The Shining?”
In general, the professors of Fairfield seem unconcerned by the Red Stag initiative, which they hope will bring students back down to the ground. Several adjunct professors have reported that they already sell their blood plasma to make ends meet, so the students’ predicament seems roughly analogous to them.
“Just wait until the next Red Sea Madness,” Halsen added.
Meanwhile, the student body has reached a predictable state of panic, mainly because most of them haven’t made friends with enough poor people to provide the blood for the university. But nevertheless, the experience has been a harsh yet immediate lesson in the cost of education — mainly because the students themselves have been tasked with providing the Red Stag payment, rather than simply deferring it to their parents.
Martha Stunskiller ‘21 commented on the situation while filling a medical dummy with fake blood for practice, saying, “I guess there’s a lot of Jesuit martyrs in the 1500s who died for their college undergrad educations. But I think people were able to get more out of their high school diplomas back then. So that’s dissimilar from us.”
Stagnation reporters later noted that Jesuits were (and still are) guaranteed a job placement after their education is over, so the analogy has that dissimilarity as well.
Students will be expected to pay the Red Stag price for their courses starting in fall of 2020. No exceptions are planned to be granted for scholarships, but students may have luck cutting their human blood payment with any sufficiently watery sauce from the Tully.
Stagnation 