Dintenfass to deliver baccalaureate address

Retiring Lawrence professor Mark Dintenfass has been chosen to deliver this year’s ultra-inspirational baccalaureate address.
Through his press agent, Dintenfass issued a characteristically brief, wry, witty, cynical and bemused response.
“You know, I’ll be happy to tell them that dreams come true. I can shovel them that shit from here ’til Sunday. Maybe I’ll tell the women to go to Vegas and be showgirls – that’ll be my last strike against the Gender Studies Police.”
Dintenfass’s agent also hinted that the august fiction professor may, instead of giving a traditional valedictory address, read passages from his upcoming novel, tentatively titled “Arresting the Gender Studies Police.”
The novel, an academic satire set in a lower-first-tier Minnesota liberal arts school features the protagonist Michael Greenstein, who was raised in the South Bronx, finding his quaint, cartoonish misogyny under siege by a group of politically correct female “scholars” and students who seek to remove “Lolita,” “Daisy Miller” and “The Sun Also Rises” from Greenstein’s syllabus.
In the novel, though, Greenstein uncovers – the hard way – a sex ring run by the steel-nerved Mia Wallace, who specializes in postcolonial Canadian women’s empowerment narrative and taught for a controversial year at Barnard.
According to first readers of the manuscript, Wallace and Greenstein chew torridly awkward scenery with each other for the middle third of the book, at which time the lead feminist discovers that the two have blackmailed each other into a dtente – or is it a twisted, angry, hateful permutation of love?
“I feel like this kind of story is what Lawrence graduates need to hear,” said Dintenfass, “because in the novel, really, it’s like in life: Neither of the main characters find their dreams coming true. They have to settle for a less appealing, monotonous, almost tortuous alternative. We’ve all grown tired of rosy ‘happy endings.'”
Dintenfass chuckled, having punned on “Happy Endings,” the name of the massage parlor that Wallace, in the novel, uses as a front business for the sex ring.
“Some may call it a dirty novel, but I call it a true novel,” he added.
Senior Class President Lou E Perella, a complete asshole from the East Coast, said in an interview that “As long as I’m president, I want the speeches to come with a Brooklyn accent, and I want them depressing. After all, I know I’m just going to be a busboy at my dad’s restaurant my whole life. Why should I let other people hold on to their hopes?