/nuz baɪts/

Not a wire news service but still more reliable than most newspapers.

Linguistics Department Strikes It Rich in the Library

In the face of funding shortages characteristic of belonging to the chronically impoverished half of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Linguistics Department of the University of Upper Strandswater, NY, has adopted a novel and remarkably efficacious solution. Rather than offering teaching assistantships, the Department’s administrators encouraged graduate students to become baristas in the University Library’s five coffee shops. Between brews, the baristas became counselors and confidants of library administrators, who suffer tremendous emotional stress over the allocation of space within the building.

The Linguist-Baristas proposed a symbiotic solution, in which Library staff place unwanted books, rather than cash, into the “tips” jars. These volumes are then transported to the Linguistics Department, where upper-level undergraduate students operate an Amazon storefront to liquidate them. The Linguistics collection has been spared from the culling process, while rival departments have been gutted.

In the first five years of this cooperative agreement, the Library was able to clear enough shelf space to begin construction of a sixth coffee shop, while the Linguistics Department’s “fieldwork fund” was able to send four faculty members on year-long research sabbaticals in Bali.

One Linguist-Barista told SpecGram “we’ll be delighted if other Linguistics Departments can learn from our experience. Just don’t start with the Anthropology books—they aren’t worth anything even on Amazon.”

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