In the beginning was the word, and the word was the law: the law of Rome. And Justinian I commanded that the law be gathered and compiled. And in this compilation of 1,500 volumes, he found many conflicts, so he ordered these conflicts resolved and fifty were published as The Fifty Decisions. And when this was done and apparently liking the number fifty, he commanded that the 1,500 books of law be digested down into fifty volumes, and that this should be the Law of Rome henceforth. And so it was done; and so it was published, and so it was the law of the land. It was called the Digest, and it was good and much simpler than what had gone before.

And as the years passed, it was used in both East and West, but then the West fell to barbarians. And so they lived in the light of a golden age for five hundred years with no professional lawyers to pester them and make wreck of their lives, only having to worry of honest robbers and barbarians.

For nearly five hundred years, happy were they indeed until the great dragon was released upon them as someone found an ancient copy of the Digest and thought, “Hey, this is cool, dude! Let’s read the law!” And the law was read. And the word spread throughout Western Christendom that the ancient law had been found, and lawyers could once more be trained to ravage the countryside. And men came in their sharkskin suits and with their shark-sharp teeth and sharper poignards. They came from each nation, and they came to read the law. They came from nations great and small, and after having read, they dispersed once more to plague their nations with the curse of Roman Law.

But in the City of Bologna where the Digest was kept, they also had local laws. One of these local laws said that if a man came from a foreign nation and borrowed money that he failed to pay, it could be recovered from any man from that nation. It also said if one man from a foreign nation committed a crime, all other foreigners of that nation could be punished. So, if a Greek borrowed a hundred florins and absconded, the next Greek who came along was expected to pay the hundred florins or suffer the consequences. And this caused great strife for the foreign men who came to read the Digest. And lo, they banded together, men of each nation together that they might watch one another and keep each other from racking up exorbitant debts that others would have to pay. Thus they came to make contracts together for the instructors to tutor them in the law. And they came to be an economic powerhouse in the city of the Digest, such that the city fathers decided that the law students were a good thing that brought in many revenues and they came to outnumber the natives. And the local laws for collective punishment of foreigners were repealed.

The students of the law became a city within the city, and eventually they banded the various nations of men together and called themselves a university. And so they were established in the year of our Lord 1088, a mere eighteen years after the Digest had been found, as the University of Bologna, the first that had ever existed. And the great plague of lawyers was unleashed throughout Western Christendom forever more.

Not satisfied with this, universities decided that they should send out more plagues upon the world. After all, was God satisfied with sending one plague down on Egypt? Of course he wasn’t. He hardened Pharaoh’s heart so the fun could continue, and so it was with universities and they sent out plagues of men educated in various ways and in professions where guilds had been doing a fine job before. Soon, they unleashed the medical doctor on the world, a plague that killed many millions until and as the knowledge refined and the laws were changed so they could dissect actual human bodies and not just goats, which might have caused some misapprehensions about how humans were built. And they spread with their Latin words, but no knowledge of germs for hundreds of years, and when finally one of their number learned of germs, they all yelled, “Preposterous! I shall continue to go from dissecting diseased corpses with my bare hands and then go to help a woman birth a child and not wash my hands in between, because everyone knows that bathing is unhealthy.”

Not satisfied with two plagues, universities unleashed wave after wave of educated men. There were clerics, well-educated in matters theological, and then English majors. Soon, the English majors were writing poems and even starting poetry magazines. Oh, the humanity!

Later, they started educating engineers and architects and more. All of these occupations had previously drawn men into them who had studied under masters and were now educated by college professors who only professed to know anything, but had avoided the real world.

And then they meddled in business, creating MBAs, efficiency experts, and scariest of all, the process management expert, who knew how to do nothing except how to tell you what you were doing and how to do it better, even though they had never done it themselves, but because they had watched a real worker for an hour once.

Not satisfied with these plagues, they came up with one more that they thought would make the world burn: journalists, educated in how to save the world through slanting the news.

When even this did not work, the universities decided that they could not allow teachers to be educated through normal schools any longer, but they must be educated at universities in education programs, which like the process management experts before them, turned out people who only knew how to educate, but had no knowledge to pass on to the students, so they had to rely on books and lesson plans that were given to them so they could teach actual subjects poorly, since they did not actually know anything about the subject and flunked it when they were going through school, which is why they became an education major, because they knew they could do better than all the teachers who failed them.

And so the end days are upon us, and it all started in Bologna.

Note: the author of this article has taught college courses, been a process management expert, run a poetry magazine, and committed various other crimes against humanity.

Published in Group Writing