In a display of remarkable stamina, facial discipline, and spiritual endurance, Columbia sophomore Inti Lectual (CC ’27) reportedly spent seventy-five consecutive minutes in his Contemporary Civilisation seminar pretending he understood the reading.
Sources confirm he did not, in fact, understand the reading. “I opened Hobbes,” Inti said later, visibly shaken. “I really did. I highlighted things. But the words… they weren’t landing. They were just… happening.” Despite this, Inti entered Hamilton Hall with the calm confidence of a man who had skimmed SparkNotes with intention and briefly read the Wikipedia summary on the walk over.
“I felt concept-adjacent,” he explained. The real danger began fifteen minutes into class when a classmate opened with, “I was really struck by the tension between sovereignty and legitimacy.”
“That’s when I knew,” Inti said quietly. “I was in a different tax bracket of understanding.”
Eyewitnesses report that Inti immediately adopted the Columbia Survival Posture: leaning slightly forward, chin resting on hand, nodding at irregular but thoughtful intervals. He underlined random passages in a book he had not emotionally connected with and flipped pages occasionally to suggest cross-referencing.
“He circles words like ‘power,’ ‘authority,’ and ‘state of nature,’” said one of his classmates. “It’s incredible. He has no idea what they mean, but he circles them like they owe him money.”
As the discussion intensified, Inti’s internal monologue reportedly shifted from “I can piece this together” to “I need divine intervention and possibly a gap year.” The true terror arrived when the professor made eye contact.
“Inti,” she said gently. “Would you like to jump in?”
Witnesses describe what followed as “an Oscar-worthy monologue delivered under extreme duress.” “Yes,” Inti began confidently, buying time with a slow inhale. “I think what Hobbes is really doing here is… destabilising our assumptions about… authority.”
The class nodded. Encouraged, Inti pressed on.
“And that destabilisation is, in many ways, productive. It forces us to confront… the structure.” At this point, even Inti was unsure what “the structure” referred to. Government? Society? The classroom layout? He would later confirm he was “freestyling.”
“It was stunning,” said one student. “He created meaning out of oxygen.” The near-disaster occurred when a peer uttered the most dangerous phrase in the Core lexicon: “Building on that…”
“That’s when my soul left my body,” Inti admitted. “If she had asked me to clarify, I would’ve withdrawn.” Fortunately, the professor redirected the conversation to someone who had actually done the reading and was using phrases like “normative framework” without irony.
After class, Inti was overheard telling friends, “That seminar was actually kind of fire. The discourse was rich.” At press time, Inti was seen in Butler opening next week’s reading, scrolling once, and whispering, “I’ll absorb it through proximity.”
He will not.
