With one kidney and three fewer toes than she had a week ago, Margin Overa, a professor of economics at the University of Utah, is searching for a pair of two-toed socks at All-a-Dollar.
“It’s the only place that I can afford to buy things since the incident,” she said.
The incident that Overa refers to is U President Bernie Machen’s fund-raising campaign?a campaign that has left Overa and her colleagues befuddled and the rest of the university community steaming mad?and rightly so.
Two weeks ago, Overa received an email from the president’s office soliciting donations for what Machen calls, “The Legislature Sucks Fund.” Because Overa’s salary did not allow her to donate Machen’s requested “50 percent of your earnings,” Overa returned an email stating that she “could not eat for half of the year” if she donated the cash.
This is where Overa’s story becomes dangerous. Two days after sending her response email, Overa was called into the president’s office.
“He told me that I should know a lot about supply and demand,” recalls Overa. “I told him that I do know a lot about supply and demand. Then he put on his angry eyes and said, ‘I demand money, and I want you to supply it.”
After Overa refused, Machen threatened her with “vetoing her tenure,” unless she “donated something else.” Scared at the prospect of losing years of hard work and dedication, Overa signed her name on the line to “donate something else.”
After signing 125 separate sheets to verify that she would make the donation, Overa did something she regretted for the rest of her existence at the U?she asked what that something else was.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Overa said. “He turned around with a big grin on his face and yelled, ‘Surprise! I want you to donate organs!”
Overa recalls laughing nervously and searching the room, “waiting for that Candid Camera guy to pop out from behind something.” But he never did, and Overa found herself being whisked away by a group of white-coated individuals.
“Next thing I knew,” she said, “they asked me if I wanted to donate a kidney or a lung. I like breathing a lot, so I told them kidney.” Overa woke up the next day in her office, thinking it had “just been a bad dream.”
However, she discovered the scar from the operation, and later that afternoon discovered three toes missing from her left foot. “Toes aren’t organs. I don’t know what they were thinking,” she said.
It turns out that Overa’s experience is not unique. In a similar instance, Bee Flatt, director of the U’s student choir, protested donating more money to the U: “I told them that I had already paid my dues to the university. The next morning I woke up and only had one ear.”
Machen denies formulating any of these nefarious alternative money-soliciting schemes. However, all roads lead to the U president. In secret tapes obtained by The Comical, Machen can be heard telling special assistant Bill Menson “I don’t need their stinking cash. I’ve got organs?mwa ha ha ha ha!”
Soon after the tapes were recorded, Menson, fearing for the well-being of his own organs, left the U to preside over another Utah institution. He did not go public with his concerns about Machen’s plans, but in an earlier interview stated that he “doesn’t think that selling organs on the black market is the answer.”
When asked what the answer is, Menson replied, “Wholesale.”
In an effort to reform Machen’s fund-raising, the newly formed Union of Angry and Organless Professors has made public a list of demands and alternatives.
Union leaders are demanding that Machen donate his brain to the fund-raising efforts. When asked why they chose the brain, Leif Mealone, a professor of physics and union treasurer, belligerently responded, “Because he hasn’t used it lately.”
Other demands on the list include “handicapped parking spaces for professors and staff recovering from donations” and “at least 30 percent of the proceeds from organs that were shipped to China.”
These demands are realistic in light of this year’s fund-raising efforts, and it will behoove Machen to fulfill their requests.
Unfortunately, Machen has not seriously considered any of the union’s suggestions?except for one.
Start soliciting the same kind of donations from students. And you thought your parking space was the only thing you’d lose this year.
Disclaimer: The Comical is pure satire and appears at the beginning of every week on The Chronicle’s Web site. Please take the stories as jokes and don’t call your lawyer. Thanks.