Humor & Satire | Vassar’s serious mistake: Everybody’s been there

Things aren't looking so great for Vassar right now. Once thought of as a respectable finishing school for women and gays, Vassar is now known as a heartless institution run by joy-killing sociopaths who broke the hearts of 76 wide-eyed high school seniors by offering them love and acceptance and then cruelly revoking it half an hour later. Even in my coldhearted opinion that's pretty rough. Some parents are considering lawsuits; others are demanding their application fees back (which, little do they know, have likely already been embezzled or spent on something really important like expensive flowers or "science").* It seems like the cool thing to do is to get mad at Vassar, to tell Vassar what a terrible, callous, insensitive asshole it is. But I'm not going to do that. It seems like no one is even bothering to consider how Vassar feels! As president of the Vassar Association for People Who Send Humiliating Drunk Emails/Texts/Sexts/Facebook Messages/Carrier Pigeons, I think it's my responsibility to advocate for a little sympathy for Vassar, because everyone makes mistakes.

We've all been in Vassar's position. Imagine: It's late Friday night. Your fingers tingle with drunken desperation as you scroll through your contacts for the name of that boy you hooked up with sophomore year but haven't talked to since. He's SO HOT, you think. You find his name and hastily type some poorly spelled missive replete with words like "sex" and "horny ;)" and "please I'm desperate I'll do anything and I just washed my sheets I promise." You wait. You hear him knock on your door, right on time. Breathless, eager, you pull the door open. Then you see him: Suddenly you remember the way his breath always tasted like peanut butter and that weird thing he always wanted to do with socks. You start to think that maybe his SAT scores weren't quite high enough, that his essay was kind of cliché ("How My Second Cousin's Benign Tumor Changed My Life"). Time passes, maybe a half hour. "I can't do this," you say. "I've made A Serious Mistake."

You slam the door in his face and think that you hear him humming "Someone Like You" as he slouches away. The next morning you feel a crippling sense of embarrassment. You grab your phone. "If you have any questions," you type hastily. "Please feel free to contact me on Monday morning."

This scene could have been taken word for word from any one of our Tumblrs. We've all made mistakes and said things we regret. So why can't we bring ourselves to forgive Vassar? Ask yourself: How would you feel if every time you accidentally sent a mass drunk hook-up text to 76 high school seniors at once someone wrote a New York Times article about it?

*Though, Vassar, you probably should give their application fees back. Or at the very least buy them all a pair of Skidmore sweatpants.