“This is the first time I’ve seen Chancellor Khosla on campus,” said one student. “What a hunk!”
Photo by Ezra Bihis
This past Thursday, UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla announced a competition to determine which of the eight colleges will be permanently removed to make room for the upcoming Ninth College, which is currently accepting applications for the 2025–2026 academic year. The contest will take place over the last two quarters of the 2024–2025 academic year. Any remaining students from the losing college will be expelled. “This competition is a great opportunity for students and alumni to showcase their Triton pride and collaborate on the future of this campus,” Khosla said. “I know people are upset about their college potentially being removed, but there’s simply no space for Ninth College. If I could build over the nature preserve, you know I would. But noooo, you just have to have your little tree pit in the middle of our big, beautiful concrete jungle.”
Khosla clarified the details of the competition in a university-wide email the following day. “The competition is very simple,” Khosla wrote. “Each college will be ranked from 1 through 8 across six categories, and the college with the worst average rank will be gone forever. The categories are as follows: famous alumni, average GPA of the student body, school spirit, number of Unolympics won, donations to the school, and finally, the nicest and most timeless things said about me.” Immediately following the announcement, college administrators began reformatting their general education sequences, and the UCSD Alumni Association split seven ways.
Eighth College students protested components of the competition, staging “nice-ins” at the Chancellor’s residence. “We’ve basically been saying nice things about Khosla in a strategic way so he can’t tell if we’re being sarcastic or not,” said first-year Vertical Infinity. “Until he removes the stupid competitions for famous alumni and donations — since we don’t have any yet — we will be sitting outside his home, at least eight students deep.”
Despite the negative reaction from some students, Khosla has moved forward with his plan, which was ratified by the UC Board of Regents during their November meeting. “I don’t understand why everyone is complaining about these rules. If you need money to make donations, ask your parents, or take out some more student loans,” Khosla said. “And you know how easy it is to become ‘Tic-Tac’ famous [sic] these days? Heck, even I was for a few weeks after I boldly enacted my indispensable initiative to put more hammocks up in front of Geisel. Honestly, Eighth College needs to take more inspiration from what I named them: the number ‘8,’ or, in binary, ‘111.’ That’s III in Roman numerals. When said aloud, it’s ‘eeeeeeeeee,’ like how I sound on a roller coaster — an activity I can afford any time because I work hard convincing other people to give me money for a living.”
Other colleges have decided to focus on maximizing their rank in a select category, a specialist strategy which they believe is the secret to guaranteeing success in the competition. “We’ve hired Ivy League professors to grade-inflate; famous alumni are controllable with social media, the Unolympics already happened, school spirit will never improve, and we already have the Just Walk Out technology at Sixth Market set to charge students a $1 billion ‘voluntary donation’ fee,” explained Sixth Provost Philippe D’Negen. “But the one category everyone is focused on is the ‘nicest and most timeless things’ said about our bestest boy, Pradeep. Eighth has been playing the volume game, Warren has been leaning into their engineering background and bombing the message ‘We love you Khosla!’ into the New Mexico desert, and Revelle has been playing the parentification card. Their strategies are all impressive, but ours is the best. We’ve been conditioning him with the smell of silicon dust, so he’ll naturally feel compliments from Sixth students are much better than anyone else’s. We’re already seeing huge results — his nose hardly bleeds anymore!”
