“THWwACK,” said one anonymous ruler.
Photo by Ariel Chen
After a recent faculty report exposed “really scary” deficits in student mathematics preparedness, Chancellor Pradeep Khosla will begin taking a “big meterstick approach” to fixing UC San Diego’s reputation. “Guys, we have to lock in,” Khosla implored during a board meeting, “I saw this one girl on Instagram say we’re the Ravenclaws of the UCs, and I really don’t want to lose that.” To this end, he has hired a new Mathematics Department Chair, Dr. Baldi Baseeq, who he hopes will “foment our students’ love of adding and subtracting, or whatever it is you math majors do.”
Khosla further explained, “Baseeq’s helping us transform our image: we can’t be seen as an outmoded egalitarian community filled with disgustingly diverse students and their unique backgrounds and skills, but rather a cut-throat, slap-meterstick institution, just like Yale, my beloved. Our scores should reflect this.”
Former Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Physical Education at UC Berkeley, Dr. Baseeq works in researching novel ways to augment student learning outcomes — both in and out of the classroom — with a focus on studying fear and its effects on retention. Today, he serves as Principal Investigator for the Corporal Punishment in Mathematics Research Group on campus. The new Baseeq Lab will also be opening Spring 2026, where he’ll be working with the federal government to vet new methodologies that currently violate some “nit-picky” laws.
Dr. Baseeq is implementing a new course, MATH 1, to “remedy the lack of primal fear our students associate with mathematics.” Enrollment in MATH 1 is “immediate and irrevocable.” Students are automatically added to the roster when they receive a grade lower than 80% on any one Mathematics Department assessment. When questioned about this unorthodox screening, Dr. Baseeq explained, “Listen, if you’re not perfectly understanding simple topics like vector calculus or linear algebra, the root cause isn’t discrepancies in resources, education quality, or plain difficulty of the subject; it’s that you suck, like, as a person.”
“I don’t really believe in ‘traditional’ teaching,” he elaborated. “Someone else should have already taught you basic mathematics, and I’m sure they did a great job and the real problem is you. So instead of taking the time to explain how math works, I prefer to fuel your motivation with the necessary afflictions.”
According to his students, Dr. Baseeq’s sections — which meet exclusively from 12 to 12:50 a.m. outside the ERC dorms — involve “horrors [they] didn’t sign up for.”
One traumatized attendee, Rosemary Higgins, shared her experience: “This Baldi guy is not professional. He keeps popping up with a meterstick out of nowhere in the dark like some wannabe Freddy Frazbear [sic] and whacks us if we get his weirdass problems wrong! How is it my fault if I don’t know how to solve ‘7+2 = 6+x’ when my high school skipped algebra during COVID?”
Dante Finch, who claims to have been repeatedly “jump-scared” by Dr. Baseeq, expressed major dismay at being in MATH 1. In his own words, “I need to get out of this infernal class, but WebReg won’t let me. Whenever I try to click ‘drop,’ it locks my screen until I solve some trick question my mom says mixes the Lord’s crosses with these horrible Arabic digits. She says to thank Mamdani.” Sam North, a mathematics and economics major, is “really bummed” about MATH 1: “I got a 79 on my MATH 140C exam — which was later curved to a 105, mind you — and they won’t let me get back to my major requirements until I outrun some superhuman vectorized octogenarian in the middle of the night. Back to the basics, I guess.”
Born of the verboten demicolon, Aidan stitches together phrases, appendages, worlds. He’s allegedly “connected things beyond your mortal comprehension” and plans to horizontally expand across the phylogenetic tree. Resulting from Virginia Woolf's "malign machinations," he has been banished to a lighthouse until he can create functional Icarian wings.
