For the past few weeks we’ve been hearing about all these student-athletes entering the Transfer Portal.
Where, I wondered, is this Transfer Portal, and can I enter it?
Well, by virtue of the investigative powers vested in me as a professional journalist, I have found out the location of the Transfer Portal. I promised my sources that I would not reveal the TP’s whereabouts, but they did not object to my reporting on the experience of entering it.
So here I am, in the Transfer Portal as we speak, destination to be determined. Looks-wise, the TP resembles the full-body scanners we enter when we go through airport security.
Big difference: You don’t have to assume the hands-up position.
Bigger difference: The Portal attendants offer free snacks, and they’re a much better selection than the Biscoffs and Stroopwafels you get on the plane.
Technology-wise, the Transfer Portal is modeled on the transporter used on “Star Trek,” which is to say, it disintegrates your molecules when you enter and reassembles them before you exit.
Now here’s the exciting part for the professoriate: According to a memorandum that the NCAA Board of Directors has not yet disclosed, the student-athletes’ privilege of placing their names in an online database that makes it known that they intend to take their skills elsewhere is soon to be extended to faculty!
The only requirement is that one lavishly Tweet one’s undying gratitude toward the institution one is leaving, lest the world think one was in any way dissatisfied with the place. Here are some actual examples from student-athletes that can serve as models:
- “Being at Penn State has been nothing short of amazing. I can’t thank Coach X and the staff for giving me an opportunity to further my academic and athletic career at one of the most prestigious schools in the country.”
- “Words cannot describe how grateful I am for my time at Penn State. The relationships I have made in my time here will last forever.”
- “PSU has provided me with an experience that I will always cherish and hold dear to my heart.”
- “Thank you, Penn State, and everyone involved with me for everything! I am forever grateful.”
The only sticking point (aside from giving up the 25-year chair due me at the end of this semester) for me was the thought of having my molecules disintegrate. But then I thought about how nice it would be to reassemble myself in a town with better restaurants.
At first, I thought I would confine my search for a new post to the West Coast so I could be near my children and grandchildren. But between the floods, the fires, the earthquakes, the traffic, the cost of housing and the lack of world-class pastrami, I began casting a wider net.
And by wider net, I don’t mean elsewhere in the U.S. or even overseas. To paraphrase yet another Transfer Portal athlete’s Tweet, I have been given ample opportunity to succeed, not just at Penn State, but in our solar system. For a long time, though, I have had the nagging feeling that I don’t fit in here and perhaps would flourish in some other planetary system.
Surely there are less predatory planets out there, civilizations where greed and power aren’t the dominant motivators of human behavior.
Plus, it struck me that it would be a shame to go to the trouble of disintegrating and reassembling my molecules just to relocate from State College, Pennsylvania, to, say, College Station, Texas. Go big or stay home, as the saying almost goes.
When I started at Penn State, friends asked me if faculty got free tickets to football games. As if! But I hear that’s a perk at some universities on the planet Zortron, so I think I’ll start my search there.
And if the Zortronians want to put my name, image and likeness (NIL) on a box of Celesti-Os — the other student-athlete perk that the NCAA is about to extend to us scholars — that would certainly sweeten the deal.
Rumors of my impending departure have reached students in my writing classes, who, judging from their social media posts, will not be sorry to see me go.
“Look; there are more important things in life than knowing the difference between a colon and a semicolon,” said a senior journalism major who would only identify himself as Travis T. “You’d think I was committing the crime of the century.”
Another frustrated writer, Vera Verbiage, took issue with what she sees as my heavy-handed copyediting.
“I know I kind of have this tendency to be a little wordy sometimes,” Verbiage said, but it’s just really demoralizing when he covers my whole entire paper with a ton of red ink.”
In that same spirit of trimming superfluity, I’m hoping that when my molecules get reassembled on another planet, some of them will be left out.
They don’t need to beam all of me up, I figure. Maybe I’ll be less heavy-handed once my hand is less heavy.
