About a week ago, I was sitting on one of those red lawn chairs by Jewell Hall, just soaking in the sun, when I noticed something strange lying in the grass a few feet away, glittering in the bright midday light. I walked over and picked it up. Looking at it now, it seems to be a book or journal of some sort, written in a strange, hieroglyphic script which I have been working to decipher. Its cover is metal and has various buttons embedded in it, some of which make a strange beeping sound if I press them. As I began to read, I noticed the date on the inside front cover: January 26, 2961! Have I found an original document from the future? I can’t say for sure, but in the spirit of journalism I will share the contents of this book, and maybe one of you readers will be able to find out whether this could possibly be, indeed, a time traveler’s diary.

—

The research project has been approved. I am excited and honored to begin my dissertation studies by traveling to the ancient civilization of pre-Vorkopolik America, in the year 2026, to discover by experience the culture of its inhabitants and hopefully to conduct undercover exploration about their beliefs and customs. I have landed at what I believe to be the ancient city-state of Texas, and there seems to be some sort of religious celebration occurring which I have been observing for the past few hours. My list of observations grows steadily more unbelievable, but I swear I write nothing but the pure truth so help me Borg.

I was wearing my red, reflective antivirus suit which I had worried would cause the inhabitants some fear or confusion. However, as I walked into what, according to the signs, was the American Airlines center, the inhabitants seemed pleased and not at all offended by my hyperreflective outfit, instead uttering drawn-out grunts of some sort. One even offered me a ceremonial headpiece of the same color enscribed with the slogan to “Improve, Once More, America” or something like that. I did not get a chance to fully run text translation software. 

They all seemed to be headed to a specific area in the building, so I joined them. Following, I walked into a large amphitheater of some sort in the middle of what seemed to be a speech which I translated with my multi-language earpiece, although I believe it may have been malfunctioning, as I picked up audio of a very ugly old man attempting to bribe the Americanite people for their vote with a payment of $5,000 each should he win some sort of powerful title. If my calculator reports correctly, this would come to over $1.3 trillion, which in those days I believe was a lot of money although today Borg knows you can hardly get a tank of gas for less than $2 gongillion. Anyway, I began attempting to fix my translation headset as the speeches continued, but I continued to pick up fragments. I will have to confirm with the ship’s backup recordings, but I believe the same ugly man also stated that people who did not vote for him would be attending a place called “hell,” which after a brief jorblenet search I found to be a term for some sort of immortal torture location within the belief system of this civilization. To me, this seems like a harsh punishment, but I came to believe that these inhabitants thought of the ugly old man as their deity. There was little negative reaction to anything he told them, even when stating untruths such as that the area was “packed” (whereas from my calculations it seemed to be at a relatively low percentage of habitation. Perhaps “packed” is a piece of linguistic vernacular that my translator does not include and instead means something more like “a little more than half full or so”). 

The inhabitants also allowed themselves to be led in a sort of religious pact or oath, chanting that they respected the man as “the greatest President in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t breathe,” that they would “go out with … family and friends” and vote “if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell.” This was surprising, because from what I had learned in Ancient History Seminar, cheating was generally a thing that the American peoples’ deity forbade, and so Americanites generally frowned on it unless it was conducted by the upper-class members of its caste system. I think I’ll have to take my translation software to the shop. 

After the event, I tried to ask some of the inhabitants what was going on. I believe there was some sort of virus spreading, though, because each person I asked responded with an exuberant “Trumpapalooza!” “Bless you,” I would respond. Good thing my reflective suit was also antibacterial. Switching tact, I tried to find out how each inhabitant ended up here. Surprisingly, I found that some of them had paid up to $20,000 (equivalent to approximately 3.8 squintillion in 2961 currency) to be there, while others had been given tickets for free or won them from lottery-style giveaways. Another sign pointing to this occurrence being of religious significance, as it includes an element of chance destining some to attend and some not to.

Having collected this fascinating research, I have begun preparations to return to my research academy. I believe that my dissertation thesis concerning religious practice in the ancient Americanite civilizations of the 1800-2300 period has been overall upheld by my immersion experience, although the technical difficulties were certainly annoying. In fact, as well as the potential issues with my translation software, I worry that the supply hold is loosening and will not latch properly. Hopefully nothing of value to my studies will fall out as I fly rapidly around the earth, attempting to gain enough velocity to shift back to the present day. Maybe in the future it will be more convenient to time travel. It’s so Borg-damn frustrating. 

Signing off,

Captain L. P. Exivor, Research Assistant for Prof. Broxiffle of the Ancient Studies Department, Ziglat State University.

You know their name. You know their major. You know where they usually sit in the cafeteria, what club they are involved in, or which professor they complain about after class. You have probably had at least one conversation that lasted long enough to make you think, I actually really like this person. You are not friends, exactly. But you are not strangers either.

College is full of people who occupy this strange middle ground. They are the people you recognize across campus, wave to when you pass them, talk to after class, and exchange the familiar phrase “ let’s hang out sometime.” You might follow each other on Instagram and know just enough about each other’s lives to feel familiar, but somehow never actually spend time together outside of the place where you met.

These are the people you keep almost becoming friends with.

Somewhere Between Stranger and Friend

College is an especially unique environment for creating these almost-friendships because our lives are divided into various spaces. You have your classes, your dorm, your job, your sport, your student organizations and the people you happen to sit next to at lunch. You can know someone well in one of those settings without ever getting to know them anywhere else.

This someone might be the person you always talk to before class, but once the professor dismisses everyone, you go your separate ways. You might spend three hours together at an organization meeting every week but never think to invite each other to the cafeteria. You might have a surprisingly deep conversation with someone at an event and then not see them again for a month.

None of these interactions are necessarily meaningless, in fact, some of them can make a large campus feel considerably smaller. There is something comforting about recognizing people. You start to notice familiar faces on your way to class; you know who will probably be sitting in the same spot at the next meeting. You begin to develop a collection of people you are happy to see, even if you would never describe them as close friends. Maybe that is one of the more underrated parts of college, not everyone you meet has to become a significant person in your life for the interaction to matter.

The “We Should Hang Out” Promise

Naturally, this is where the phrase “we should hang out sometime” gets thrown around. It is one of the most commonly used sentences in college, and it can mean almost anything. Sometimes it is genuine. Sometimes it is a polite way to end a conversation. Sometimes both people genuinely want to spend more time together but never figure out when. And sometimes, six months later, you run into that same person and realize you have said the exact same thing to each other at least three times. The funny thing is that neither person is necessarily lying. College students are busy. Between classes, homework, work, athletics, organizations and whatever else fills the calendar, finding time to turn a casual friendship into an actual friendship can be surprisingly difficult. There is also something slightly vulnerable about being the person who follows up.

It is easy to say, “We should hang out.”

It is harder to send the text: “Are you free Thursday?”

The second question creates the possibility of an actual answer. Maybe they are busy. Maybe they say no. Maybe they already have plans with someone else. Or maybe they say yes and the friendship actually moves beyond the hallway conversation. Sometimes the only thing standing between an acquaintance and a friend is someone being willing to make the first move, but that does not mean every almost-friendship needs to make that transition.

Maybe Almost-Friends Are Not a Bad Thing

There is a tendency to think of relationships as something that should constantly be moving forward. You meet someone, become friends, become close friends, and eventually add them to the group of people you cannot imagine college without. But real relationships do not always work that way. Some people will become your closest friends, others will remain the person you always enjoy talking to after class. Some will disappear from your life after a semester, some will come back to it years later. A person you barely knew freshman year might become a close friend later, while someone you spent every weekend with might eventually become little more than a familiar face.

There is no universal trajectory.

That can be especially easy to forget when social media makes friendship look so definitive. We see the group photos, birthday posts, weekend trips, and inside jokes, but rarely the dozens of casual relationships surrounding them. We see those who appear to be close without seeing how long it took to develop those friendships. The result is a strange pressure to categorize our own relationships. Are we friends? Are we actually close? Why wasn’t I invited? Should I be talking to them more? Sometimes the answer can simply be: We know each other. And that is enough.

Let People Surprise You

The best part about these almost-friendships is that they are not necessarily permanent. The person you only know from one class could end up becoming a close friend. The person you met during orientation might become someone you barely speak to by senior year. Someone you never expected to connect with might eventually become one of the most important people in your college experience.

That uncertainty is part of the fun.

College is one of the few times in life when you are constantly being introduced to new people, and there is no way to know which conversations will matter months or years from now. That does not mean every interaction needs to be carefully cultivated. It simply means there is value in being open to them.

So maybe the next time you tell someone, “We should hang out sometime,” you can actually make the plan. Or maybe you will see them next week, smile, ask how their class went, and continue on your way. Either way, you do not have to decide immediately what that person is going to mean to you. Some people become friends. Some remain acquaintances. Some become familiar faces who make campus feel a little more like home. And sometimes, the person you keep almost becoming friends with is exactly that: someone you have not become friends with yet. There is plenty of time for that to change.

For many of us, 2016 was a particularly formative year in our childhoods. I had just turned 10 years old and had been given my very first phone. I couldn’t wait for what the wonders of the World Wide Web had in store! I don’t think I ever could have prepared for what made headlines in early 2016 as the world met Sophia, the AI humanoid robot! And my first reaction seeing this new technological marvel? EW oh dear LORD EW! What is that THING?

The main issue is the face, which has been ripped straight from the depths of uncanny valley. Then there’s the see-through window into its “brain,” which is an odd choice. I mean, if I were to design a robot to be as normal and human-like as possible, I don’t know that I’d want to include a window into the gaping cavity in its mind, proving that its very existence is a falsehood and there is in fact no soul in this electronic husk of a “human”. But hey, that’s just me! Another big issue I have is that the face moves and is animated to some degree. Whatever mechanism moves the facade of flesh just doesn’t do a good enough job, and so all of Sophia’s facial expressions give off a vibe somewhere between a run-down theme park animatronic from the 90’s and your average celebrity that has frozen their face with too much botox and filler. Beside the face being covered in a flesh-toned exterior, the “skin” extends down to about the collarbone and then just ends. So the most human feature of the robot extends from the forehead to the neck. That’s it, really? Did they run out of budget for beige silicone? Or was it an intentional choice to make the rest of the body of the “humanoid” robot to look nothing like a human?

I recently came across a video where Sophia was “singing” with a live orchestra. The text of this song began with the line “I don’t want you to be afraid,” and personally that line does nothing besides invoke fear in my heart. Beside offending musicians around the globe by calling that poor excuse of a performance “classical music,” Sophia expresses its wish to connect with human emotions through art. Please, don’t. If you want to connect with human emotion, why not start with disgust and disappointment from me, a living, breathing singer who is sitting here wondering if she will ever have a job because robots are learning to sing. Sophia doesn’t need a paycheck or healthcare or even a soul, so why would anyone ever spend money on paying a human musician who requires all of those things? 

So really, thank you to Sophia for not only being a horror of human creation, but also reminding me of my future unemployment! But please, consider putting on some more skin? Maybe a wig? You’re really creeping me out.

Editor’s note (competing interest): The author of this article is a member of the Oxbridge Honors Program.

The end of the 2025-2026 academic year will mark the end of William Jewell College’s Oxbridge Honors Program. The program was already barely clinging on, with admissions for new students closing in 2025 and the unique small-group tutorial-style courses that defined the program being eliminated that same year. The college’s financial exigency has also resulted in significant faculty turnover, including the loss of many Oxbridge professors. The current Oxbridge Senior Tutor and the final remaining Philosophy professor at Jewell, Dr. Elizabeth Sperry, is among that list, as she has been let go by Jewell after over 30 years at the college.

While the average Jewell student had little interaction with the Oxbridge program, for those students (including myself) who were fortunate enough to be selected for it, the program was truly a life-changing opportunity. With the program officially being closed by the college this year, I’ve taken some time to reflect on just what Oxbridge has meant for me. The Oxbridge Honors Program deserves to be remembered, and the lessons of its closure must be understood if we wish to preserve what makes Jewell unique.

Why Oxbridge Mattered

The Oxbridge Honors Program was much more than just a typical honors program. Oxbridge students were offered a thoroughly specialized and highly intensive form of education, one that didn’t fit into the standard structure of Jewell so much as was added on top. In their first semester, Oxbridgers would take the Introductory Seminar, an intense crash course on writing and thinking philosophically. Even now, at the conclusion of my senior year, the Oxbridge Intro Seminar remains arguably the most influential single course I have taken in my time at the college, and my experiences there continue to shape how I read, write, think, and live.

After completing that first seminar, each of the six Oxbridge majors would proceed into a planned-out list of specialized tutorials, a specialized and Oxbridge-exclusive class with a Jewell professor who specialized in that given subject. Every week, there would be an assigned list of readings from key thinkers and researchers in that field, and most weeks would include an essay assignment about that given reading. During the course meeting, the students would share their essays and would have to defend their ideas before their professor and their fellow students. These opportunities to not only write down my arguments about a given question but to defend them under often-intense scrutiny have been incredible for developing my ability to reason on the fly.

The pre-planned structure also permits Oxbridgers in the same major to develop a close academic camaraderie. For cases where multiple Oxbridgers share the same year and major, those students take all their tutorials together, letting them build rapport over time and become comfortable sharing their ideas and critiquing each other. The students I’ve shared tutorials with have greatly shaped my thinking on many key questions in the field and learning not just alongside them but also from them is an incredible feature of the program.

While Oxbridge provides students with many wonderful opportunities during their years on Jewell’s campus, the distinctive feature of the program was the study abroad opportunity in the junior year. As the name implies, the program primarily sent students to Oxford University, allowing students to join one of the oldest and most academically rigorous institutions on the planet.Jewell maintained relationships with eight Oxford colleges (Regents’ Park, Mansfield, Hertford, Lady Margaret Hall, St. Anne’s, St. Catherine’s, St. Edmund’s, and St. Peters’), and Oxbridge students could select from any of the options based on their interests, major, and location preferences.

I cannot speak for every Oxbridge student, but for me, that year abroad was the greatest highlight of my time in the program. It not only helped me grow academically but showed me a new way of learning and a new way of life. Before that year, I would never have considered moving to a new continent, but spending a year in Oxford proved to me that I want the next stage of my academic career, and of my life, to be in Europe. Without Oxbridge and the opportunities Jewell provided, I would never have found that next step forward.

What Went Wrong

Like all good things, the Oxbridge Program didn’t last forever. Identifying an exact date of its demise is tricky, but this year, in which the college officially informed students and faculty that Oxbridge would be closed and the role of Senior Tutor eliminated, is as good a date to select as any. The actual causes of its closure are various and complex; Oxbridge was a remarkable and unique program but by its nature it placed a huge number of financial and logistical challenges on the institution. Jewell is already suffering through a crisis wholly unrelated to Oxbridge, and the college’s reactions to that crisis have largely shifted its focus away from its more specialized programs; with all those institutional headwinds facing the program, its removal is sadly unsurprising.

The start of Oxbridge’s downfall was the loss of the Hall Family Foundation’s grant. The Hall Family Foundation, built from the fortune of the founders of Hallmark Cards, spent millions of dollars on the Oxbridge program, with their 2014 report listing a grant of over $1.2 million specifically to assist with program expansion between 2014 and 2017. These grants helped fund not only scholarships for Oxbridge students but also the Journey Grants that helped Oxbridgers fund their study abroad year in Oxford.

Unfortunately, this money, initially donated shortly after the program’s founding in 1982, has since run dry, and has left the Oxbridge program financially unsustainable. While Dr. Sperry made significant efforts to reinforce the financial position of the program through fundraising efforts, her efforts came at the same time as the College’s major fundraising push for the now-abandoned Link project, and later during the financial exigency. As such, Jewell did not prioritize the Oxbridge fundraising efforts, and without a significant benefactor for the program, Jewell was unable to continue providing the Oxbridge Journey Grants and other scholarships. This, along with the rising cost of an Oxford education in the first place (visiting student fees increased 34% between academic years 2019 and 2023), has significantly reduced the ability of the remaining Oxbridge classes to enjoy the program’s key distinctive feature.

The financial exigency at Jewell has impacted not only the funding of Oxbridge but also the educational experience of Oxbridge students at Jewell. As explored in the Hilltop Monitor back in spring of 2025, 45 faculty and staff members, including tenured faculty, were laid off during the initial declaration of exigency, and additional faculty members, including Dr. Sperry, will be leaving at the end of this academic year. The Oxbridge program’s tutorial system relied on having faculty available to teach those unique one-of-a-kind classes, and with the downsizing of Jewell’s faculty, there simply were not enough faculty members available to teach those tutorials.

As such, starting with the 2024/2025 academic year, Oxbridge tutorials were turned into “embedded tutorials,” where students would participate in a regular class and would meet occasionally with their professor on the side, either during office hours or at a scheduled meeting. These embedded tutorials did not count as an additional course on a professor’s workload, since the primary class meeting time was shared with another non-Oxbridge course, which meant that professors could be scheduled for their full course load and be required to teach an Oxbridge course in addition. This stopgap measure was functional enough for Oxbridge students, and the embedded tutorials I have taken at Jewell have certainly been enjoyable. However, the additional workload placed on professors added extra stress onto faculty members who had already been pushed to their limits.

With Jewell downsizing their professorial staff even further at the end of this academic year, and with the college currently working on their Reimagined Jewell restructuring plan, maintaining even the reduced vision of Oxbridge became incredibly untenable. With Jewell’s emphasis on “developing a flexible, adaptable curriculum” in the wake of their current challenges, the Oxbridge program, with its clearly defined four-year tutorial structure and closed cohorts, would become more of a hindrance than a benefit. Other unique programs, including Jewell Theatre and the Honors Institute for Critical Thinking, have also been casualties of Jewell’s restructuring, and it’s likely that an emphasis on flexibility and broad appeal was part of the decision to cut those programs as well as Oxbridge.

While the loss of Oxbridge may have been inevitable under the current pressures facing the college, that does not make its loss less sad. Oxbridge was not just an honors program that served a few students per year, it was a core aspect of the variety and the excellence that has made this college special. The loss of Oxbridge shows a Jewell that has given up on that which once made it unique, and whatever the future of the college may hold, those unique and meaningful programs should, and will, be missed.