Scoffayette

Student athletes rally to show support for who knows what, why

By Becoming Lafayette, Mentee (female mentor) • March 28, 2025

Jake. (Graphic by Becoming Lafayette for the Scoffayette)

Two hours after the latest who-the-hell-knows-what shutdown in Marquis Hall, student-athletes and their gallons of water were seen marching to start another protest.

The over 400 student-athletes present stood in two lines facing one another like they were parting the Red Sea.

“Wait, why are we here?” one athlete called out loudly, while hundreds of athletes chanted unintelligible garbles. Another athlete audibly complained that his coach made him attend the protest wearing a toga.

“How am I supposed to show off my gains in this, dawg?” he exclaimed.

Football players, hand-in-hand, sang “Hakuna Matata” and “Peaches” (the Jack Black one), while the fencing team brought swords from overseas Medieval dungeons, according to an undisclosed coach who made them attend the protest. An athlete, who chose to be anonymous because he thought The Scoffayette was “scarrrrry,” admitted he stole a sword and almost stabbed a field hockey girl.

“She was so short, I almost didn’t see her there,” he said.

All members of the field hockey team declined to comment and suggested The Scoffayette read the team’s fangirl blog instead.

“We didn’t think it was safe for the lacrosse team to be playing with their balls at the protest,” said Public Danger Officer Jim MyEar, who confirmed he was not bothered by the swords and also confirmed he had a really sick mullet.

College President Nicole Hurd said she was proud of the student-athletes “standing up for their hearts and what they love.”

“Lafayette is where we say ‘and,’” Hurd said of the protest. “Football and basketball and baseball and lacrosse and cross country and golf and soccer and swim and dive and track and field.”

“And volleyball and softball and tennis and crew,” she continued, forgetting a sport.

The six NARPs at the protest seemed largely unfazed. A man named Jake, who walked through the Marquis Hall chaos declined to answer specific questions, though he praised the baseball team for signing new stars: Big Justice and The Rizzler. They were not at the protest.

“They’re my seventh cousins,” Jake said. “Wait. I think they might be two of my kids.”

Editor’s note: This is a satire article featured as part of our annual Scoffayette issue.

About the Contributor

Becoming Lafayette, Mentee (female mentor)

Guiding Principles: Mission and Values

Mission Statement:

Chartered in 1826, Lafayette College is dedicated to excellence in undergraduate education. Students are engaged in a transformative educational experience that bridges the liberal arts, engineering, and interdisciplinary study. The College fosters intellectual inquiry, artistic exploration, scholarship, and personal growth in a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive community. Lafayette students become critical thinkers, creative problem-solvers, and responsible citizens of the world. (May 2024)

Institutional Values:

Engaged Learning

We cultivate a residential undergraduate learning environment where faculty and staff foster the interplay among the liberal arts, engineering, and interdisciplinary study, and nurture intellectual curiosity, creativity, and ingenuity.

Community Belonging

We value mutual respect, collaboration, and empathy in an accessible, inclusive, and diverse community where everyone can flourish.

Responsible Citizenship

We are thoughtful members of the global community, educating our students to be compassionate, ethical leaders who constructively participate in society—from Easton and the Lehigh Valley, to the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world.

Purposeful Sustainability

We value an environmentally healthy and socially just world, managing resources with care and accountability, integrating sustainability into our academic and campus life, and pursuing innovative solutions to complex local and global challenges.

Institutional Excellence

We are dedicated to excellence in teaching, learning, and scholarship across cocurricular pursuits and through the multifaceted work of the College, and hold one another to the highest standards in our respective fields.

The Lafayette Commitment

Lafayette prepares students to engage thoughtfully, responsibly, and productively in society. In a rapidly evolving world, the College is committed to ensuring that its students know how to produce and consume information in various forms, interact and communicate effectively with people from different backgrounds who may hold opinions different from their own, collaborate to analyze and solve problems, and engage with people, societal systems, technology, and the planet ethically and responsibly. As part of a long-standing Lafayette Commitment, the College prioritizes being an inclusive community of the whole, one that provides an equitable and supportive educational environment that promotes student learning and success regardless of personal circumstance. This commitment has its foundation in our liberal arts core, encouraging students to use an interdisciplinary lens to consider issues of fairness and justice, and to use that knowledge to build communities of equity and inclusion while on campus and in their lives after college as global citizen leaders.

Overview

Inspired by the extraordinary vision of our community, and carried forward by the service and support of educators and advocates, Lafayette College commits to this strategic plan with pride in our history, confidence in our present moment, and ambition for the promise of the third century to come.

From its founding, Lafayette College has been an experiment by and for the people. A group of citizens gathered to create a space to read, reflect, and bring their ideas to bear on their world. Motivated by the values of its namesake, Lafayette has carried forward this distinctly democratic origin by educating scholars, scientists, and citizen leaders since 1826. At the College’s bicentennial, Becoming Lafayette: A Vision for Our Third Century rededicates Lafayette to the educational dynamism and ingenuity that superb faculty, students, and staff have modeled from our founding. Through a curriculum anchored in the liberal arts and engineering with a rich array of interdisciplinary programs, we are poised for the next century and will welcome new generations of innovative, inclusive, and creative students. This is a strategic plan that fully embodies our aspirations toward a culture of “and” through connections that define us and delineate our strengths: the liberal arts and engineering and interdisciplinary programs; ties to our communities and a close-knit residential campus; commitments to sustainability and inclusivity. Here, guided by committed teacher-scholars and professional staff, our students engage in research, field work, creative projects, and cocurricular service. They experience the rewards of a distinctive academic program within a vibrant residential living and learning environment, where deep and historical community connections meet global reach. As they do, they develop diverse ways of knowing and build meaningful expressions of responsible citizenship. Our strategic priorities and goals are at once anchored in the College’s liberal arts core, while encouraging exploration, innovation, and collaboration around areas of technology, stewardship, and design. They emphasize both the College’s enduring connections to the greater Lehigh Valley and a robust and engaged community that spans the globe. They seek to build a future where we can have dialogue across differences and provide access to a liberal arts education, ensuring the College is an engine of opportunity. They center us in an inclusive residential learning and living space that invites us to build community and the practices of shared governance. Becoming Lafayette aims to elevate the excellence and impact of an undergraduate institution whose potential is as great as its past. The plan seeks to provide every student with an undergraduate learning experience that rivals any liberal arts college in the country, preparing our undergraduates to explore problems, imagine solutions, and create possibility wherever their lives take them.

Building Into the ‘And’: Liberal Arts, Engineering and Interdisciplinarity

The integration of engineering as part of the liberal arts is rooted deeply in Lafayette’s common core, and we remain dedicated to realizing the range of opportunities this combination affords across the full curriculum and beyond.

Through this plan, we will build upon the strength of existing collaborative initiatives and interdisciplinary programs while generating new resources, spaces, and faculty lines for an educational experience that guarantees opportunities to discover, design, inquire, and create across domains of knowledge.

Specific goals include:

Improve structures and increase potential for faculty and students to work across existing departments and programs, at the intersections of the liberal arts, engineering, and beyond
Expand opportunities for social innovation, creative scholarship and activity, entrepreneurial mindsets, and inclusive collaboration and integration across centers, libraries, and academic departments and programs
Refine and resource academic advising to ensure close advising and mentorship structures informed by the range of possibilities implicit in the “and” across the four-year experience
Increase resources and endowed funding in the Office of the Provost to encourage the scholarship, research, mentorship, and travel crucial to recruiting and retaining a world-class faculty
Create an Interdisciplinary Challenge Lab that invites faculty and students from across the institution to collaborate on projects and identify solutions to societal problem

Experience and Collaboration: Easton, the Lehigh Valley and the Globe

Lafayette has long valued experiential learning, community engagement, and the interplay between coursework and professional opportunities locally and globally.

Through this plan, we will strengthen infrastructure and funding to provide increased access to cocurricular learning experiences, including undergraduate research and creative projects, internships, and place-based and global learning experiences, such as study abroad and community-engaged scholarship.

Specific goals include:

Extend opportunities across scholarship, pedagogy, and experiential learning for students to engage in Easton and the Lehigh Valley, including connections to potential employers and training in pre-professional pathways that encourage students to consider the Lehigh Valley as a viable and attractive employment destination
Offer expanded pathways for global connection and development for all members of the Lafayette community, including students, faculty, staff, and alumni
Create a support structure for economic and community development ensuring that the College is an active participant in the growth and success of the city of Easton and the Lehigh Valley
Optimize resources and support structures for faculty and staff who supervise, design, and/or direct student experiential learning opportunities
Build on our exceptional career services, undergraduate, graduate, and pre-professional advising through robust partnerships with our alumni via mentoring, internships, student leadership, and other experiential opportunities

Democracy and Its Technologies: History, Design, Civic Practice

As an institution committed to the liberal arts, Lafayette is deeply involved in scholarly and experiential explorations of democracy and the technologies that mediate it.

The digital infrastructures and tools that affect our lives, our communities, and our institutions are crucial to understand and shape, and Lafayette is at the forefront of doing so. Through interdisciplinary approaches, the scholarship, research, and pedagogy of Lafayette faculty invite us to develop more empowered intellectual proactivity. Across areas including but not limited to AI and machine ethics, critical information studies, administrative law and technology, creative arts and design, and engineering and scientific research, our faculty and students explore how technologies both inform and form the societies we inhabit. Combined with a rich cocurricular framework across student residential life and activities that emphasize democratic principles and restorative practices, our faculty and staff will support student learning and engagement toward active global citizenship.

Specific goals toward this aim include:

Build a campuswide Democracy and Its Technologies Initiative with national reach that includes faculty and staff lines, programming, new spaces for collaborative encounters, curricular engagement, and extensive public engagement
Leverage Lafayette’s strengths across the liberal arts, engineering, interdisciplinary, and cocurricular programming to create forums for exploring AI, design, ethics, and equitable uses of technology
Promote the conditions for civic participation and public discourse both on campus and across the globe through the practice of constructive dialogue across our shared community
Integrate components of digital fluency and creativity across the curriculum, inviting students to build strategies and expertise across their four years at Lafayette regardless of major or minor
Provide a cocurricular framework across residential life, student activities, and advising that fosters a diverse and inclusive learning ground for democratic and restorative practices

Cultivating Connections: Inclusivity, Belonging and Stewardship

Inclusivity and belonging are vital components of a campus that values the well-being of its students, faculty, and staff, and are critical to creating a healthy and environmentally sustainable living and learning community.

Through this plan, the College will further cultivate the conditions for mutual trust and an appreciation for the unique contributions of each individual to the lives of those around them as well as the influence we each have on the natural world of which we are a part. From this place of connection, we will advance a thriving residential program, capitalize on the full power of athletics to build collaboration and leadership, and deepen the value of the curricular and cocurricular engagement every student enjoys.

Specific goals include:

Create and reimagine natural and built spaces that support accessibility, environmental sustainability, and well-being
Engage campus as a “living laboratory” where research and programming support our commitments to sustainability through care for and study of our natural world
Leverage the residential living and learning experience, including the creation of distinctive residential communities, common gathering spaces, and equitable standards of living throughout the residential system, to foster inclusion, interpersonal growth, and leadership development
Expand student health and counseling services, prevention, and wellness programming, and ensure that all students have consistent and affordable access to basic needs
Structure a student success hub that brings together resources from across the campus to provide equitable access and enhanced opportunities for student learning and engagement
Center and celebrate the College’s Division I athletics and recreation programming as a resource for building health and well-being, competitive spirit, and excellence, and as a source of connection, joy, play, and pride in our community
Increase investments in an inclusive workplace environment with opportunities for healthy work/life integration and deepen institutional commitment to recruitment, retention, and development of diverse faculty and staff

Strengthening Our Infrastructure: People, Process and Place

To meet the commitments set forth in this plan, faculty, staff, and students must have access to the tools necessary to achieve these goals.

A sustained focus on excellence requires investment in and careful stewardship of such fundamental resources as a diverse and inclusive workforce, a high-quality physical plant, and an exceptional digital and financial infrastructure. Through this plan, we intentionally foreground purposeful sustainability with our mission and values close at hand.

Specific goals include:

Refine and implement an equitable compensation strategy that optimizes the College’s ability to recruit, maintain, and develop the diverse talents and abilities of both faculty and staff
Invest in opportunities for professional growth and development for faculty and staff, including training, mentoring, and leadership development
Continue our commitment to excellence and affordability through innovative processes and practices that open the doors of Lafayette to talented students from all backgrounds
Design physical and virtual learning and living spaces that demonstrate our commitment to environmental sustainability, accessibility, belonging, and inclusion
Support and sustain foundational infrastructure (physical, systematic, financial, digital) that meets the needs of faculty, staff, and students in a data and technology-rich environment, including ensuring that classroom and lab spaces provide innovative and creative modalities for teaching and learning
Build campus planning and operations around principles of environmentally sustainable development guided by the most current Climate Action Plan, including improving connectivity between our three physical campuses

TO GREAT THINGS AHEAD!

– Trebor Maitin ’24 (he was recently found after an 11-month disappearance)