UAF officials revealed in a memo yesterday that a decades-long experiment by UAF physicists and mathematicians, in which "students" were encouraged to study liberal arts on lower campus would be cancelled as of this summer.

Mathamatics professor Sergei Avdonin was upset by the announcement. "The UAF College of Liberal Arts was one of the best tools for random data generation that we currently have available," Avdonin said.

The college (or laboratory as the scientists call it) has been a source of information for almost every scientific discipline. Biologists were able to study the eating habits of mammals exposed to a limitless, but slightly toxic food supply at the Lola Tilly Research Station (LIRS), and computer scientists calibrated supercomputers and studied the ability of other simple computing machines (the students' own brains in this case) to deal with cognitive dissonance.

"The laboratory itself was designed to create an immediate sense of confusion in the subjects, who would walk inside and find themselves immediately on the third or fourth floor of every campus building," Zoophysiology professor Brian Barnes laughed. "Not to mention the insane ‘class-work' they were assigned."

Barnes expressed some remorse for stresses that subjects were forced to undergo for the sake of science. "We felt a little guilty forcing them to work so hard on such obviously futile tasks as trying to make sense of intellectual junkyards like philosophy, history, and journalism, but we needed all the papers and essays as a constant source of in-depth feedback that reflected the level of psychic damage that they were sustaining," Barnes said. "Besides, this bunch was really the bottom of the barrel. If they weren't part of the study they'd just be strung-out, dead or in prison."

Much of the research, most of it classified Top Secret by the government, appears to have been done for the military. Anonymous sources in the Pentagon said that one experiment, "OPERATION: INTRAMURAL BROOMBALL," was a program designed to unleash a soldier's inner animal. "We believed that between broomball and the data collected from the ‘music' department's experimental percussion sessions, we hold the keys to an ultimate weapon," the source said.

The study has been cancelled due to lack of funding, as well as because of the increasing difficulty in controlling the subjects, Chancellor Steve Jones said. "They began to organize behind the banner of the ASUAF Student Government, a student organization that was so responsive to student needs and so aggressive in its pursuit of the truth that we knew they would discover the ruse eventually and lead the students in revolt," Jones said. "Also, many students became suspicious of their surroundings because of the popularity of the Matrix movies."

Now that the study is over, its unclear what will happen to the students next.

"They are completely unprepared to exist in the real world," Barnes said. "We hope to find homes for them, but it's not easy. Obviously, euthanasia is the worst-case scenario."