Humor from David Galef in Inside Higher Ed:

When U of All People was founded back in 1970 (briefly losted in the foreclosure of 1987), little thought was given to its surroundings, the sleepy hamlet of Ennyville -- primarily because there was no Ennyville. The university itself emerged on 150 acres of reclaimed swampland, a federal land grant only in the sense that the government wanted to distance itself from a toxic sludge event that at the time was termed “accident at the plant.” But as the university grew from pontoons and quonset huts to potholed paths and faux Gothic halls in dire need of repair, the blind forces of capitalism have seen to the birth and growth of the town.

Ennyville started in 1975 with Sleep Here, a forty-room flea lodge built to accommodate the families of graduating students, campus guests, and sordid trysts. From there, it was a short series of steps to enterprises such as Mart’s Fuel Mart (“We’ll give you gas”) and Main Street Movie Theater (now Main Event, a performance space whose latest show was devoted to foot flogging, linked to the university art department). For obvious reasons, Ennyville has a close relationship to U of All People, or, as biology professor Jen Edix describes it, “the parasitism that exists between a nematode and the human intestine.” Other faculty have been less kind in their assessments. Yet Ennyville is careful to preserve a traditional college town air, if only to attract those at U of All People who consider themselves traditional or collegiate.

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It begins:

I’ve identified the culprit. I came into the courtyard and found a large yellow Labrador retriever chewing away on the corner of one of the benches. His leash had been tied to a nearby sapling.

And it ends:

Now that things have quieted down after the rally/concert/riot, I’ve been able to take inventory around the LLC. We will definitely need to have the lawn re-seeded and about 30 replacement rhododendrons and azaleas planted. The “dog-friendly area” (boy, was that a bad idea) will probably require a backhoe to fill in the holes dug during the two-day event. And the benches are all gone. I think I saw two of them tied to the top of a VW microbus as it headed west on Route 12. I’m pretty sure they got the ones with the teeth marks.

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