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On Thursday, sixteen professors were suspended with the uncovering of their involvement in an illicit Facebook gambling application through which they bet points on students' grades each semester.
The scheme, which involved departments ranging from Modern Culture and Media to Neuroscience, was devised in late 2006 by Prof. Andrew Bazin of the Computer Science Department. The users of the application made their bets with little background information, relying only on the name, hometown, and year of the students in question.
Said Bazin, "I figured it would be a fun way to pass the time. I put down twenty cyber doubloons on freshman Chen Qiu getting an A in Chem 33 - now tell me that wasn't a sure thing!"
Indeed, many of the professors lamented the shutdown of the ring. Under the condition of anonymity, one Professor Emeritus stated that it was "the only goddamn reason" she was still at Brown.
"My heart still races when I think back to that time freshman Arun Vijaydranath dropped to a B in Linear Algebra," she said. "That son of a bitch made me lose the title."
Perhaps more shocking than the gambling ring itself was the fact that some professors were bribing others to give better grades to long-shot candidates, effectively exchanging large sums of money for online currency. "Look, it came down to this: Would I rather have five hundred dollars and my morals, or a new sexy-mouse avatar on my secret Facebook application? It was an easy choice," said Prof. Caroline Schwelter of the Sociology Department. "And honestly,
the odds were so low for foreign exchange student Sergey Mikhailovic to get an A in MCM1500S: Foucault and his Interlocutors, I was set to win big."
Eventually, however, even Schwelter had to admit things were getting a little out of hand. "One time I told a professor I'd burn his house down and eat his children if he didn't accept one of my starter's late problem sets," she said. "In retrospect, that was probably a little fucked up. But in my defense, I only needed ten more digi-dollars to get a virtual Chihuahua for my profile. I think that makes it pretty understandable."
"My only regret," concluded Schwelter, "Was that they caught us a week before the playoffs."
