Many doubt her ability to thwart the long-gone nation like her predecessors.
With President Leeds getting ready to fully take on her new role as university president soon, many students and faculty have burning questions as to what kind of policy decisions she will make and what direction she will lead the school in. While these questions are undoubtedly important, there is a far more pressing concern about a sinister issue hiding in the University of Tulsa’s murky past. You see, while most university institutions are bastions of Commies and all those blasted Marxists, until recently, one would never be able to know that about the University of Tulsa. TU is a relatively apolitical campus. Its first-ever protest did not happen for the Korean War, nor for Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, African apartheid or any of the standard events you would expect students on a college campus to protest. No, TU students did not have their first on-campus protest until True Commitment in 2019 where they protested not public policy, but university policy itself.
Now of course, in its prime, the Soviet Union was aware of and deeply grateful for American universities’ tendency to spread Communist and anti-war messaging that benefitted the USSR. For this reason, the state often focused its propaganda efforts on universities through sympathetic students and faculty. However, at least outwardly, TU had no such people. For this reason, the Russians had to get creative in order to gain a foothold here: they kidnapped several professors, brainwashed them and gave them sleeper agent triggers so that every year at a certain time they would sabotage TU’s curriculum to be in favor of the United Soviet States of Russia. Due to the nature of tenure and the general consensus among professors that the appropriate age to retire is when you are six feet under, many of those brainwashed sleeper agents are still among us today.
While for many institutions, the fact that the USSR collapsed in the ‘90s greatly decreases the extinct nation’s threat to them. At the University of Tulsa, these Cold War attacks are a problem exactly because the USSR is gone. The Commie bastards had control of a satellite where they could blast professors with their brain control lasers from the safety of Moscow, providing specific instructions to the brainwashed professors when the sleeper agent took over. In the absence of that space laser, the sleeper agents are directionless. When the transformation happens and the agents realize the USSR is dead and gone, they default to wanton sabotage of anything on campus they deem capitalistic.
In the past, they have destroyed the coffee makers and vending machines in Helmerich Hall, on the grounds that business majors die if they cannot consume caffeine every hour on the dot. They have infiltrated the Board of Trustees and gotten the university to invest its endowment money heavily in the oil industry, not in the U.S., but in Russia with its oil oligarchs. The most dangerous event of all was the Sugar Pill catastrophe of ‘07 when one of the sleeper agents tried to poison themselves and all of the economics professors with an overdose of a prescription medicine undergoing a trial run on campus, an event that would have killed tens of people had they not grabbed placebo sugar pills instead of the real ones.
These holdovers of the Cold War era present a real threat to the TU way of life. But is President Leeds prepared to handle them? Brad Carson was a true hero for the way he handled the Commie revolt every year — so great was his discretion that almost none of the students even know it happens, and there is no record of it happening during his tenure other than the surely well-used $40 million allocated to “opposing communist threats” in the 2024-2025 budget. Rick Dickson was never seen on campus without his iconic hat, which had razorblades sewn into the brim and a communist-seeking radar system enclosed in the main compartment. Leeds, on the other hand, has no documented experience in psychologically altered soldiers, and many are concerned that she is not up to the task of defending the University of Tulsa from the red menace.
Will she prove concerned parties wrong, or will she rise to the occasion? All we can hope is that Brad left good instructions for President Leeds, because God rest our consumerist souls if the agents manage to put Starbucks and Chic-Fil-A out of commission for a few days.
