Following increasing reports of a coronavirus outbreak in northern Italy, rumors around the cancellation of the BOSP study abroad program in Florence have circulated campus. While the program did conclude, students were not sent back to the United States as was incorrectly confirmed by the Stanford Daily and the Fountain Hopper, and Program Advisor David Malacki instead came up with an “innovative and tasty solution.”
Faced with the choice between a substantial threat to students’ health and the disappointment of ending a faculty member’s three-month paid vacation early, Malacki struck a delicate compromise by sending students packing, but only to a quarantined spaghetti factory located in the mountains fifty miles east of Florence. Handing them each a handful of euros for their train ticket and a grim pat on the shoulder with a gloved hand, Malacki ensured that each of the students made their connection safely before catching his own flight to Fiji.
According to junior Regan Scofield who used the last of her phone battery as a desperate plea for help, telling us this, students at the spaghetti factory are made to stand at a spaghetti assembly line for fourteen hours a day. “Cai and Miles are on mixing and kneading, Jamie is cutting, Noah is packaging, and I’m rolling,” she whispered to a Flipside reporter during her daily five-minute lunch break. “It’s absolutely hell. My arms feel like they’re going to fall off, and my dreams for the last few days have been filled with rolling pins beating the shit out of me.”
As of press time, other BOSP programs were considering similar alternatives to their usual offerings in wake of the coronavirus, such as setting fire to Australia students’ belongings, sending police to accost Hong Kong students, or supporting a military coup that leads to over fifteen years of dictatorship dominating Santiago students’ lives.
