A Message from Your University President on the Recent Hippopotamus Attacks
Dear Faculty, Staff, Students, and AI Summarization Tools,
I want to express my deepest gratitude for your patience as we explore innovative solutions to the recent string of gruesome hippopotamus attacks reported across central campus. Your steadfast commitment to our strategic mission, despite the multiple tramplings, maulings, and other encounters we shall henceforth refer to as “terminal networking opportunities” has not gone unnoticed.
While this hippo-centric challenge is unique to our university, we have long prided ourselves on being trailblazers in academia, and I hope you will join me in applauding our incredible institution and its recent stewardship of the world’s third-largest land mammal.
How we respond to adversity defines us. We are strongest when we stand together—as demonstrated by the hockey team’s largely successful repelling of the hippo over the weekend, accomplished with only minimal casualties. Yet, while this is an encouraging sign of progress, the situation remains dynamic. On a related note, it is with deep sadness that I must report the untimely passing of our Interim Dean of Arts and Sciences, who was summarily dismembered behind the biology building late last week. While we are grateful for his decades of leadership and will miss working alongside him, we recognize these transitions as moments of opportunity, in which fresh perspectives can inspire new growth and innovation in bold new directions.
In these unprecedented times, it is clear that a coordinated and visionary response is required. Thus, I have asked the Board of Regents to assemble five strategic committees to assess the breadth of the issue and to chart a path forward. Each team will focus on a pillar of our new foundational approach:
- Heightened Creativity: Advancing forward-facing, inclusive approaches to avoiding disembowelment.
- Intensive Research: Fostering discovery that addresses critical challenges (such as being crushed to death) and unlocks new opportunities.
- Participation and Engagement: Cultivating spaces for meaningful exchange between students, faculty, and large territorial mammals.
- Partnerships and Community: Creating positive local outcomes, ideally in areas less accessible to murderous semiaquatic fauna.
- Optimizing Stewardship and Effectiveness: Leveraging resources wisely to achieve sustainable, far-reaching impact, particularly in fortified buildings.
Our HIPPO initiative will unite emerging technologies and human expertise to support future generations while minimizing hippopotamus-related carnage. We will move quickly: I have requested that each committee submit a preliminary proposal to my office by the end of the calendar year. This strategic roadmap gives me full confidence that meaningful, systemic change is within reach.
I am energized by the opportunities before us, and in this spirit, we will strive to embrace our institution’s unexpected new role. Accordingly, I have instructed our interim vice provost to hire at least three additional hippos on an adjunct basis for the coming academic year. These non-tenure-track positions—hippositions, if you will (#hippositions)—will provide valuable, experiential, and visceral learning opportunities across the curriculum.
These are not decisions we make lightly. Given the financial realities we face, we must act decisively to preserve the high-quality, accessible education our students expect and deserve, while also remaining competitive in an increasingly hippo-driven marketplace. This is a time of growth for our institution, and we will continue to press forward with a momentum matched only by that of the hippopotamus as it rampaged through the theater department last Thursday.
As always, I sincerely thank you for all you do for our university and the people (and hippos) we serve. Your feedback on these and other matters is deeply appreciated, carefully reviewed, and, as always, promptly ignored.
Sincerely,
President Thadwick Hume, PhD