Orange men and women, your school calls upon you in its hour of need! Will you pick up the cell phone Daddy is paying for and answer the call?

Yesterday, I received an urgent plea from none other than Chancellor Nancy Cantor, begging me to help the school from repeating its mistake of last year: letting in too many freshmen. Here is a transcript of that phone conversation:

‘Hello, Mortimer’s Sex Emporium?’

‘Is this Seamus O’Connor? Nancy Cantor here. Look, if you mention my name in one more of your columns, I’m gonna gut you like a fish and put your entrails into the taco meat at Kimmel, you got me?’

‘Ma’am, I think you’re looking for a different Seamus O’Connor -‘

‘FEAR THE MIDGET!’

I’m pretty sure she was about to ask me to help keep the freshman population down, but she accidentally hung up the phone.

Anyway, here’s the deal. Syracuse can’t afford to bring in another oversized freshman class, or we’ll have to start housing people in hellish and unspeakable places like the Skyhalls.

Wait, what? Already there? May God have mercy on those poor kids’ souls.

As April approaches and high schoolers start getting their college acceptances, we can expect to see droves of ‘qualified’ students wandering the campus. Take a look around your next lecture and tell me this school doesn’t take just about everybody. Do you see more note-takers or crossword-doers? Are you reading this very sentence when a professor is speaking? That’s what I thought.

If you love this school, you will take it upon yourself to discourage, embarrass and scare the living daylights out of every ‘prospie’ you can find. This way we can ensure only the mentally strongest – meaning most willing to strip naked and paint themselves orange for basketball games – will survive.

Try to look for tour groups if you can. This way, you maximize your freak-out factor. You’ll know these groups two ways. First, there will be someone in an orange polo telling lots of lies, like, ‘This is an academic building,’ when they really mean, ‘This is a building where people in large groups all do Sudoku at the same time.’ Second, the group will be 50 percent pimply kids and 50 percent parents (covered in Otto stickers) who persistently ask, ‘And which dorm is for geniuses? And where can my genius daughter sign up for 400-level classes her first semester?’

When approaching these groups, you have a few options. One trusted method is to walk close by and have a very loud cell phone conversation about your weekend antics that included four strippers, one pre-op transvestite, a sedated Bengal tiger, Paris Hilton, eight kilos of Rasta, a Geo Metro with an engine modified to run on children’s laughter, Scrabble – no, Scrabble Junior, another pre-op transvestite and the dean of The College of Arts and Sciences.

Then there’s the ever-popular running about pantsless with your hands taped to bottles of Jack Daniel’s, then telling the group how you’re celebrating SU’s weekly ‘Get Crunked Monday.’ This works best on a Wednesday.

Lastly you have my personal favorite, which is to approach wide-eyed and shush everyone in the group. Then whisper, ‘Quiet! The Independent Thought Police will hear you!’ For added effect, have six of your friends rush over in police costumes and beat you into a coma. Hey, no price is too high for your school!

Remember, the goal is to keep the incoming class as small as possible. In fact, the optimum class size is 120, just enough to fill out the fraternity parties so the rest of us don’t have to go. Happy freaking!

Published on March 27, 2006 at 12:00 pm