New College Independent Alumni/ae Association

Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.

I was jokingly remarking to fellow alumni the other day that perhaps New College should initiate a smiling faces campaign similar to the one recently undertaken by the Kremlin’s department of social advertising. I noted they might even emulate Moscow’s metro intercom announcements on where to find psychiatric counseling when happy face billboards don’t suffice.

Then today I find out that the pseudo faculty rebellion this summer, led by the perennial lacky Adam Cornford, was apparently just pious posturing to obtain large raises. In fact, the briefly-voiced demand for trustee accountability this summer has been completely turned on its head by the flaky professor.

As the newly-appointed Public Information Officer for New College, Cornford — much like ministers of propaganda in the Kremlin — has set out to search and destroy all publicly available information about the school’s history of misfeasance in academic and fiscal integrity. In his first mission in subverting the public’s right to know, Cornford hacked the Wikipedia site by deleting news stories about the school’s long-standing corruption and incompetence.

Unfortunately for the poet-turned-propaganda-csar, both his deletions and falsifications have been detected by Wikipedia, preserved by alumni, and will likely be exposed by local media. Perhaps Cornford and his masters deemed this shrewd misbehavior as necessary to overcome the severe decline in student enrollment following the July 31 front page expose in the San Francisco Chronicle. Still, one has to ask, How is it that this coincides with the school’s motto of creating a more just, sacred, and sustainable world?