COLUMBUS—An ambitious PhD student at Ohio State was intent on cleaning the microwave oven in the graduate office, where 30 highly educated assholes reside.

24-year-old Rita Lin graduated from the prestigious Chinese University of Hong Kong with a degree in philosophy and the dream of becoming a well-read janitor in the land of the free. “Cantonese food is less greasy than American food,” she said. “But in grad school here, I also see a bunch of lentils and used teabags and other healthy vegan shit that philosophers of normative ethics need me to clean.”

But when Ms. Lin attempted to communicate with her colleagues about microwave sanitation, she was met with resistance.

“The aforementioned advantages that supposedly come from constitutivism are controversial. Without further argument to the contrary one need not grant that the constitutivist is exempt from accusations of committing the naturalistic fallacy. Nor need one immediately concede that we have to be agents, or that—even if agency is inescapable—authoritative, non-arbitrary moral norms somehow come out of constitutivism,” bellowed graduate student Dan Whitaker, as pieces of arugula and pimento cheese flew out of his philosophical orifice.

“e is ES-evidence that h (with respect to an epistemic situation ES) if and only if e is true and anyone in ES is justified in believing that e is (probably) veridical evidence,” muttered colleague Curtis Peacock, while he rummaged through his beard in search of a piece of pepperoni.

“First, admit that you have a model. Then, acknowledge that the model will never date you. Then you find one that’s isomorphic to that model,” said fellow intellectual asshole Sean White.

Ms. Lin dropped out of graduate school two semesters later. She never got to clean the microwave oven.

Categories: Education

Tags: analytic philosophy, graduate school, ohio state university, philosophy, satire