(Tontitown, AK)—Ozark Hills College, previously a liberal arts institution with a Great Books program at its core, today announced a series of changes, described as “right-sizing” by the college’s board, in order to put the struggling university on a better financial footing. “These changes are painful but necessary,” said recently-appointed college president Melvin G. Woods, formerly CEO of a Fortune 500 company. “We took the least-revenue-generating of our faculty members—you know, those older, mainly white, mainly male professors who teach philosophy, literature, history… the kinds of subjects that do nothing to prepare you for a job in the real world—and burned them at the stake. Brutal? Maybe. But really, what else are they going to do with their lives now anyway ?”

The college also razed fourteen buildings that had housed various liberal arts departments. “It was cheaper than refurbishing them to use for our expanded nursing and business administration schools,” said new board president and entrepreneur Michael F. Guttman. “Plus, we are making 98% of our classes online, so we barely need a P.O. Box, much less a quad and a bunch of antiquated brick buildings. We even made a couple of the fires look like accidents for insurance purposes… whoops, that’s off the record, OK?”

In a final step, administrators asked students to contribute to a large bonfire of non-textbooks that no one reads anymore. “Shakespeare, Plato, Milton, Chaucer, you name it,” said the dean of the school’s new STEM Mega-Complex. “We are cutting our book budget to near-zero with the online courses. And wasn’t it Hawthorne who said, ‘Now we shall get rid of the weight of dead men’s thought, which has hitherto pressed so heavily on the living intellect’?”

“Whoops, I shouldn’t be quoting dead white men from now on.”

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