Partly Cloudy, 64°
School officials scrambled Monday to rectify the latest mistake made by Brown’s bumbling admissions team, which completely forgot to admit students to the more than 1500 vacant spots in the class of 2014.
The pile of 30,000 applications, including almost 3,000 sent in by early-decision applicants, went unnoticed on the admissions office desk for over ten months.
“They must have gotten shuffled under some other papers,” said Dean of Ad- missions Edmund Raben, “or maybe we had to set them aside when we moved the air hockey table in here to make the office into a cool hangout spot for the summer. Somehow the apps slipped our minds. Just one of those years, you know?”
Admissions officers consoled themselves by saying they didn’t really want to admit anyone to Brown anyway, but confidential sources said that in their hearts of hearts, the officers are deeply disappointed about missing the deadline.
Meanwhile, administrators are furious about the gaffe.
“I told those buffoons at admissions not to procrastinate,” said President Ruth Simmons, tossing her hat to the ground upon hearing the news, “I warned them they would get stuck with their safety students if they waited too long, but apparently they didn’t even admit those.”
Simmons said she sent a letter to the admissions office every week reminding them to stay on top of their applications, but somehow she failed to get through.
“For weeks I did have this creeping feeling like we were missing something,” Raben said, “I kept going over the latest admissions statistics, reading through President Simmons’ letter reminding us about the applications, trying to put my finger on what it was. ‘Probably just my anxiety again,’ I told myself. But then one night I woke up sweating, sat bolt upright in bed, and was like, ‘shit, the applications!’”
Some argue that the unattended A Day on College Hill event in April should have been a major red flag for the admissions staff, who had assumed that the low attendance was because “their flights were canceled, or maybe there was something really good on TV that weekend.”
In an effort to conceal the error, the 10-member admissions team has been adopting elaborate disguises and posing at orientation events as the students they were supposed to have admitted.
“Yes, it is I, Lord Humphrey Ellingshire,” Associ- ate Director of Admission
Peter Harris said while wearing a monocle and cape at a first-year icebreaker last week, “I am here on a foot-ball scholarship from the Kingdom of Macedonia. One interesting thing about me beginning with the letter ‘L’ is that I Love Sex and the City.”
The admissions team managed to maintain the facade for a week by shopping every offered course and consuming thousands of pounds of cafeteria food a day, but was exposed Monday when Harris placed an order at the Brown Bookstore for $45,000 worth of textbooks and school supplies.
Despite the debacle, sources expect a boost in applications next year, as Brown’s new 0.0 percent admissions rate has transformed it into the most selective, and therefore desirable, school in the world.
