It came to me in the middle of the night. I heard a rattling outside the window of my penthouse suite at the top of Low Library. I struck upright in bed and cautiously investigated the window. When I drew back the curtain, it flooded the room—200 million individual dollar bills, frantically swarming around my bedroom like bats in a hurricane. I screamed, but the noise was drowned out by their millions of voices, speaking in one, echoing cadence—
“Two hundred million. You could have saved us. Two hundred million.”
“No,” I cried, “no, I couldn’t have! There was nothing I could do!”
“You could’ve capitulated even harder, Claire.”
This thought has haunted me every night since we first laid out the red carpet for the Trump administration. There was always this nagging feeling that there was something—some freedom, some student liberty, some degree of academic autonomy—that I could still sacrifice in order to appease our President. Maybe if I capitulated just a little bit more, I could’ve kept more money. But I’ve never been able to figure out what else I could’ve done.
“I did everything I could,” I cried, “we’re the poster child for academic cowardice! John Oliver called us the Little Bitch University!”
“We don’t give a shit what John Oliver said,” the swarm of cash answered, “You could’ve done more.”
I watched as the money swirled, at first seemingly at random, before morphing into monochrome images—paintings of what I could’ve done differently. The bills were folded and assembled to show me cutting the ribbon at the Trump Legacy Library. Then they showed the name Limbaugh shining proudly on Butler’s facade, they showed me Kid Rock on stage rocking out at Bacchanal, and finally, they illustrated a CommonApp supplemental essay reading “What is a woman?” I was devastated. There was so much I could’ve been doing to lower the bar of academic integrity. I just never thought big enough. “I’m sorry,” I screamed, “I’ll do better. I’ll pull some strings and get Leavitt a Pulitzer.” After I said this, I heard the roaring wind of the cash cyclone stop, and I opened my eyes to see that the phantom fiat bills had vanished. The truth they revealed to me, however, is permanent.
