Off-Third: The Board’s Minutes, Reimagined

After reneging on a promise to release the minutes of their meetings, the Board of Trustees has published a summary of their annual June meeting. But since they never released the actual minutes, we’re left with no choice but to imagine what might have happened.

NYUs+Board+of+Trustees.+%28via+NYU%29

NYU’s Board of Trustees. (via NYU)

Abby Hofstetter, Opinion Editor

Off-Third is WSN’s satire section.

WILLIAM BERKLEY: Okay, okay. Order. It’s great to see you all again, but right now we have business to get to. Andy, you said you had a presentation for us?

ANDREW HAMILTON: Yes. Thank you, William. You all know how much I dislike rankings, but we did well this year, so I’m quite proud to present them. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to report that we kicked Harvard’s rump.

[SCATTERED APPLAUSE]

HAMILTON: Yes, yes, I know. I promised to make NYU affordable, and I have followed through on my promise — as the 39th most expensive school in the country, we are now officially affordable.

BERKLEY: While we’re talking about affordability, that reminds me: we need to come up with a budget for next year. Does anyone have any suggestions?

HAMILTON: Well, I want to make Weekend on the Square as big as possible. Recruiting is imperative to running an elite university, and now that we have more Pell Grants than Harvard we’re going to have some steep competition.

BERKLEY: Okay. We’ll allocate 3% of the endowment to Student Affairs, and that’ll all go to the Center for Student Life for Welcome Week.

JOHN PAULSON: Isn’t the budget for Student Affairs also supposed to go to the Student Health Center?

BERKLEY: Yeah, but the students can’t see how much money we give to any department, so we can basically do whatever we want. How do you think we get all of those celebrities to judge UltraViolet Live every year? How do you think we pay for Strawberry Fest? How do you think we got Monet X Change to host Drag Bingo? We don’t have to disclose anything, so we can spend the money however we want.

HAMILTON: And what we want is cool sh-t for recruitment.

PAULSON: That checks out. Can I have some budget money for my side job?

BERKLEY: Isn’t your side job fundraising for Trump?

PAULSON: Yeah. Do you have a problem with that?

BERKLEY: No, not at all. You can have the money; I’ll just say we used it toward a research grant or something.

HAMILTON: Wait, what? I want that money to go toward financial aid.

BERKLEY: No, I’d rather we give less financial aid to students.

PAULSON: Since when do you care about financial aid, anyway?

HAMILTON: You know, for the diversity statistics.

PAULSON: Also, do you really need diversity?

BERKLEY: That concludes our time. All in favor of the proposed budget?

PAULSON: Aye.

HAMILTON: Aye.

MICHAEL STEINHARDT: Aye.

BERKLEY: With that, the budget passes, and our meeting has concluded. I’ll see all of you at the after-party.

Off-Third is WSN’s satire section. Try not to take us too seriously.

This article is satirical, and all quotes and events are entirely fabricated unless stated otherwise.

Email Abby Hofstetter at [email protected].