Vic students have long sought after the mysterious reason our Dean of Shmoooodents Kenneth Palace made the move from his beloved Woodsworth College. Since he loves to refer to his time at the other college so fondly as if it were yesterday, it may surprise students that he has been a part of our college for over a decade and has had a significant hand in shaping student life and Dean’s Office policies. Other students around Vic have questioned this narrative due to how the Dean of Shmoooodents’ office has been notoriously reluctant to confirm whether or not it has policies in the first place. Numerous theories have arisen in place of an official explanation for how we ended up with our current Dean of Shmoooodents’ Office head, but the truth has recently been uncovered by the Dean’s Office Oversight Division after receiving many anonymous tips from current and former students and faculty.
The Dean’s Office Oversight Division (DOOD), in a thousand-page report, has concluded that the reason Dean Palace left his position at Woodsworth College is that he repeatedly forced vegan students to eat chicken nuggets, a practice which he has been allegedly continuing here at Vic.* Witnesses of this practice have described it as malicious, but not delicious. Research has shown that chicken nuggets are generally not the food of choice for vegans.
Students have described turning to the Dean’s Office in times of crisis, only to have Dean Palace call the campus’ chicken nugget ‘safety’ force, which, as Dean Palace often stresses, is technically separate from the Toronto Chicken Force. Allegedly, Dean Palace has been known to promise a ‘chickening’ to students if they are undergoing a mental health crisis. When student activists pressed him on this issue, Palace said he was “just joshing around,” despite the very real threat to students and the fact that chicken nuggets are not appropriately trained to deal with mental health crises.
During his report at the most recent fall Caucus, Dean Palace attempted to get ahead of the accusations by stating that “student activists” have been crafting a narrative that the Dean of Shmoooodents’s Office always gives vegan students chicken nuggets, when “in reality” it only occurs “rarely” and under what he determines to be “extreme circumstances.” Student leaders have countered that inflicting this experience onto any student poses a serious ethical issue and has proven not to help students in crisis, but rather make situations worse.
Conversely, Dean Palace stated in the winter Caucus that no such thing had ever occurred and that he had “never heard” of these chicken nugget incidents, despite his earlier claims and the leftovers strewn around Goldring. “I would never threaten a student with a chickening! Who said that?” said Palace.
The problem of chickens on campus is systemic, and not limited to the Office of the Dean of Schmoooodents. This kind of response to a mental health crisis doesn’t just affect the ‘chickened,’ but the entire flock. The greasy smell of fried chicken permeates the entire college, even when a single student is forced to scarf the plate down.
This situation is ongoing as student leaders are examining the university’s approach to handling these crises, but Dean Palace affirms that the chicken nugget approach is the best practice for the well-being of students.
* This piece is satirical: to the best of our knowledge, no vegans at Vic have been force fed chicken nuggets by any member of the administration. Please treat this only as the piece of satire this is, and bon appetit! ;)
