The Back Page / Matt Lau
Alarming Number of Students Stuck in Oral Stage
Findings released today by the Grad Center’s Psychological Counseling and Adult Development Center (hereafter PCADC) have confirmed what many in the GC community have long suspected. A vast number of GC students are regressing to the oral stage.
“I was really proud of the progress I had made when I finished coursework,” said Mark Schiebe, who was speaking on condition of anonymity. “Then I made my orals lists and something strange started to happen. Every time I sat down to read, I fell asleep and woke up in a fetal position with my thumb in my mouth. And I was sucking it with intense pleasure. This even happened to me on the train during rush hour once! I was so humiliated it was kind of enjoyable.”
Many other students have reported similar incidents, all of which are detailed in the PCADC report. “In extreme cases not only are they sucking their thumbs, we have documented cases of students sucking their toes as well,” said the report.
“This has resulted in a number of serious injuries, including pulled groin muscles, slipped discs in the lower back region, and even a few hernias. These injuries can have devastating financial consequences for students without medical coverage. We also found that many students are having to get braces or other orthodontic prostheses as a result of their ‘new’ habit.”
In addition to the increase in self-inflicted injuries during naptime, the oral stage epidemic is also deleteriously effecting students’ personal and professional lives. “My boyfriend was so normal the first few years of our relationship,” recalled a female student still in coursework. “Then he got to the oral stage and all he wanted was for me to breastfeed him! He wouldn’t even leave the house and insisted on sleeping in this little wooden prison he built that he called his crib.”
A professor quoted in the report elaborated a distressing anecdote, “I agreed to let a student who had finished taking classes audit my class. Each week she got weirder and weirder. It started off with just some loud crying episodes, which I finally realized were demands for nourishment. The only thing that shut her up was a latte from the coffee spot in the lobby. Then that subsided and she would just sit there and vacantly stare at my chest while sucking her thumb. Which would be weird in any case. But I’m a dude. I don’t even have breasts!
“Then one day late in the semester, just as people were settling into their seats, she attacked me. She leaped on me, pinned my arms with her legs, ripped open my shirt and tried to suck my left nipple right off my chest. Overall, it was a real turn-on, but I told her that kind of thing was more appropriate for office hours. Wait, you’re not going to record that last part, right?”
Near its end, the PCADC report offers some speculations on this seeming epidemic, “It is understandable that as students advance toward their degrees, and by extension adulthood, they might have reason to hesitate.
“There are a lot of unknowns out there. After the oral stage, there’s the dissertation stage, or, as we prefer to call it, the anal stage. This is when students have to learn not only to excrete leavings, but also have to come to terms with parting with their feces. It is difficult, in other words, to produce so much bullshit that it adds up to a dissertation, let alone let others judge it, defend it, and finally let it go down into the toilet bowl of ideas sometimes called academia.”
The report concludes by outlining countermeasures that can help students who are stuck get unstuck.
“Basically, like all aberrant sexual behavior in children, actions that can be construed as oral and regressive should be called ‘naughty’ and the perpetrating student should be called ‘a naughty boy or girl’ as well. Slap them on the hand or across the face. If nothing else works, give them a pacifier.”
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