The Academic Oregon Trail

Oh, so many ways to die on the Oregon Trail… Even more ways go meet your Maker when you spend 30+ years in Academia.

For those of you the are too young to know what The Oregon Trail software game was, it was a text-based strategy video game developed by Carleton College students Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) beginning in 1975. It was developed as a computer game to teach school children about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. In the game, the player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon via a covered wagon in 1847. Along the way the player must purchase supplies, hunt for food, and make choices on how to proceed along the trail while encountering random events such as storms and wagon breakdowns. Far more often than not, you ended up dead before you reached your destination.

You have died from Academic Overload
You have died of Adjunct Anxiety
You have died of Assessment Atrophy
You have died of Board Bloat
You have died of Budget Bleeding
You have died of Bureaucratic Bottlenecks
You have died of Classroom Chaos
You have died of Committee Contagion
You have died from Constant Comparison Syndrome
You have died of Curriculum Cancer
You have died of Department Drama
You have died of Faculty Fatigue
You have died of Funding Freezes
You have died from Hyper-Specialization Isolation
You have died from Infinite Independant Studies
You have died of Ivory Tower Isolation
You have died of Leadership Lesions
You have died from Meeting Meltdown
You have died of Mentorship Measles
You have died from Metrics Obsession
You have died of Paperwork Paralysis
You have died of Pedagogical Paralysis
You have died of Perpetual Policy Paradoxes
You have died from Perpetual Precarity
You have died of Policy Psychosis
You have not Published, but Perished.
You have died of Red-Tape Roadblocks
You have died of Resource Reductions
You have died from Reviewer 2 Syndrome
You have died of Rubric Rigor Mortis
You have died of Syllabus Sclerosis
You have died of Technology Tantrums
You have died of Tenure-Track Torture
You have died from Toxic Meritocracy
You have died from Toxic Teaching Disenfranchisement

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