Lander, WY – The Lander headquartered National Outdoor Leadership School used to have a near monopoly on the thriving businesses of “adventure education” and “experiential learning.” Students would come from across the country and the world to Lander to get shown how to walk in the backcountry, how not to die whilst walking around out there in the mountains, and general skills of that sort. You know, the things most WCC students picked up as toddlers in their backyard.
But that all changed with the arrival of a “liberal arts college named Wyoming Catholic College right in our backyard,” said NOLS president Bernie “Bamboo” Hitchens in a speech to NOLS’s board of directors today. “Obviously they have no qualification to be running an outdoor program, or reason to, for that matter, so that’s why they came running to us when they wanted to kick their homeschoolers into the woods for a few weeks. But then just look at them now, cutting right through the heart of our business. Right across the street from us, using the same equipment, probably even the same training manuals, and driving the same vans. How’d we let it happen in OUR town? How’d we let our people get slowly pushed off the street by those suitcoated homeschooled kids? But we’re going to fight back, and push it into their terrirort this time!”
His solution? Rather than having WCC’s COR Expeditions slowly replace NOLS contract by contract, undercutting them all the time, and “ultimately leading us to oblivion,” Hitchens proposes that NOLS simply move in on WCC by starting a liberal arts college of its own.
“Obviously, look around the room, its not going to be a Catholic liberal arts college. And its surely going to be a liberal liberal arts college, but we can really cut in on them with what I propose,” the NOLS president said, unveiling a large poster logo for his proposal to the board of directors:
As he outlined, Wyoming Not Catholic College (WNCC for short) would be everything WCC is, but liberal. “We’ll have an outdoor program like they do, but our technology policy will be phones required everywhere and all the time. We’ll have “experiencing trees” sessions instead, of, whadda they call it, Mass? We’ll teach Mandarin Chinese instead of Latin. We’ll still read the Great Books, but we’ll read them in the opposite order, highlighting those real greats like Marx, Hegel, and the like as the standard and Aquinas and Dante as the guys to object to.”
“And the best thing is,” he added. “We’ll look so much like WCC from the outside wth their branding that we may even hoodwink a few of them into coming here instead.”
The NOLS board decided to unanimously approve Hitchens proposal, mostly because they had no other choice, but there doesn’t yet appear to be any interest from students anywhere in attending this “rival” college, even as WCC student enrollments are set to increase a further 30% next year compared even to the record set this year.