by Dr. Louis Leaker

A perhaps not so surprising discovery was made today when an X-ray technician filing away X-rays of the Cornell administrators realized that many of the X-rays showed missing vertebrae in the spine. Furthermore, the number of missing vertebrae seemed to increase as the administrator climbed up the upwardly mobile bureaucratic ladder.

Since the number of vertebrae lost seems to be proportional to the length of time someone spends in the administration, faculty in Chemistry and Chemical Biology propose that vertebraerosion is caused by exposure to the element administratium.

Another possibility is that the loss of vertebrae is related to the number of microaggressions experienced by the administrators as part of their lived experiences. A proposal to test this hypothesis is competing to be one of the wild card projects of the Transdisciplinary Moonshot Initiative. This proposal involves faculty and graduate students in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, gender, Marxist, queer, disability, thing, and critical race theory studies.

An anthropologist and a historian familiar with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni report on The Cost of Excess: Why Colleges and Universities Must Control Runaway Spending suggest that a comparative study should be done to determine the cause of  vertebraerosion. To accomplish this, they (plural) suggest that researchers exhume and X-ray the bodies of university presidents who served before the era of bureaucratic bloat when a single administrator had to take responsibility for his/her decisions.

No matter the cause, a Cornell alumna, who is an orthopedic surgeon and a member of the Cornell Free Speech Alliance (CFSA), proposes that the CFSA could reach out to its over 6000 members to donate money for the senior leadership in the Cornell bureaucracy to get vertebrae replacement surgery.

In a stunning demonstration on how fast the vertebrae disappear, the technician compared an X-ray taken weeks before one faculty member, who had never been part of the bureaucracy, got a promotion to become a departmental assistant-vice-deputy of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Three days after the promotion, one vertebra disappeared. Compare the before and after pictures above.

The X-ray taken a week before the promotion shows a complete normal-looking spine with all the vertebrae.

The rapid onset of vertebraerosion among members of the bureaucracy should be considered as an alternative to Professor Walter E. Williams’ evolutionary hypothesis that college and university administrators…are a crossbreed between a parrot and jellyfish. It is too soon to know if vertebraerosion has a hereditary, biological, environmental, or socially constructed cause.