A SCAM we can all get behind

No-shave November is finally upon us, so it’s the perfect time for me to introduce the newest campus organization: the Society of Collegiate and Academic Mustaches, or SCAM for short. The aim of the SCAM is to give the student body the leadership skills that they will need to succeed outside of college.

Now, I’m sure many students and administrators will be hesitant to let a SCAM operate on campus, but let me assuage your fears; this is a SCAM that we can all get behind.

First off, the SCAM is Title IX compliant; you don’t have to be a man to take part in our SCAM. Our membership is open to the entire student body, and even if you can’t grow facial hair, you can still benefit from all that SCAM has to offer.

Secondly, SCAM provides students the opportunity to develop and demonstrate their leadership abilities through debate and problem solving at hour-long meetings every Monday evening. SCAM discussions center on real world subjects, like T-shirt purchases and how to silence nosy newspaper reporters.

SCAM also endorses the most innovative and cost-effective trends in higher education, like Open Education Resources, or OER.

Our SCAM OER has been designed to fit into an award-winning system known as the Proprietary Information Platform for Education Development, Research Excellence, and Academic Merit (PIPEDREAM.)

For a negligible institutional licensing fee, the OER PIPEDREAM gives educators at CSC the opportunity to share their time, talents, and tireless work in a royalty-free environment.

We actively encourage faculty to contribute to this program because, at SCAM, we firmly believe that you can’t put a price on your work. Despite our lack of accreditation, students will have free access to the OER PIPEDREAM’s massive library of mustache and facial-hair related open-online coursework. The future is now!

The next step for the SCAM will be gaining access to student activity fees. We intend to appeal for these funds in order to send our executive board and a faculty adviser to the OER PIPEDREAM seminar in Park City, Utah. This year’s conference will be presented by the Bureau of Universities for Lifelong Learning’s Society for Holistic Integration of Technology, or BULL-SHIT.

The BULL-SHIT conference will cost approximately $18,500, but after glancing at the pamphlet they mailed to us and 15-minutes of extra research, we’re convinced that it’s a small price to pay for the esteemed BULL-SHIT accreditation. We feel this will benefit the entire student body.

We have heard complaints that the SCAM’s executive board is a privileged group who feel that they are somehow entitled to go on this trip, but we simply want to say that this is untrue. They deserve it.

While it is true that two of our executives already attended this conference last year, they didn’t learn anything so we need to send them again. Never mind that one is a graduate student and the other is a senior who will be graduating in May; you simply can’t quantify or qualify the benefits of providing them another opportunity to develop their leadership and network on the student dime.

Now it’s reasonable that some students and faculty might object to money going toward an OER PIPEDREAM or a BULL-SHIT conference, but any and all nay-sayers should be silenced and reminded of the benefits. We won’t tell you what those benefits actually are, but we will remind you: The SCAM will benefit all students, and spending your money on BULL-SHIT will make this campus better.