Death by Equity

A tragic story of snow, whiskey and quad, in the backdrop of our perpetual construction site.

It was a long, cold winter night. Two UMass Boston professors - A and B, met in Professor A’s office to discuss their joint research project and the meeting lasted well into the evening. At some point they decided to take a short break to check their emails. Upon reading the latest edition of the Academic Quad, Professor B came up with a brilliant idea: Whenever the word “equity” was mentioned, they would take a shot out of Professor A’s well hidden stash of whiskey. 

Alas, their little drinking game went awfully wrong after the first paragraph. Decades of living in their mothers’ basements did not prepare their livers for such a huge amount of booze. Totally sh*tfaced, the duo wandered blindly into the cold night and fell into the snowy ditch where the real Quad may or may not stand one day. 

They were discovered the following morning by the construction workers, suffering from severe dehydration and hypothermia, and were taken to the hospital. Unfortunately only Prof. A survived. The university administrators were quick to react to the unimaginable loss: They promptly cut the deceased Professor B’s faculty line, suspended Professor A for illegal possession of alcohol on campus  and used the money to fund two new Associate Vice Provost positions for responsible drinking and for grief counseling.