I know there’s been a lot of conversation lately about some changes to campus, so I’d like to shed some light on a few of these issues. As the director of Administrative and Business Services, I help make sure Drexel University’s money is being used wisely.

Drexel is known for having a vibrant modern urban campus, and in fact we see ourselves as being at the forefront of urban campus innovation (take that New York University). Since this is the single most important aspect of the University, we’re focusing many of our efforts on becoming moderner and urban…er.

For example, we have purchased The Gallery at Market East — you know the one, it’s connected to the subway, the stores are knock-offs, it smells like a public toilet, all the jewelry is fake and when local high school student say, “Meet me at the mall, it’s going down,” this is the place they are referring to.

We feel that its prime Center City location, nestled between Chinatown and the Department of Transportation, is essential to the new direction the University is moving in. The Gallery will require $1 billion in renovations in order to pay off the mafi— or should I say, our Italian-American Heritage Association partnership dues; to pay for advertising for our “maker spaces” which will look exactly like mall kiosks; and to remove all of the existing cold hard mass-manufactured metal furniture, and replace it with identical furniture from the Millennium Hall collection at three times the price. And there’ll be a broom closet for the design and merchandising students or whatever.

We received some irritating bratty student pushback that this time, who are spouting nonsense like money and space should really go towards a more “worthwhile” investment like student club space, an intercultural center, a student lounge, faculty offices, sports facilities, or some other entitlement crap like that.

We took a full 15 minutes of a lunch meeting to “thoroughly examine” the possibility of all, or any, of these and determined that 1,080,002 square foot space and $1 billion budget simply would not permit any such requests at this time,  but that we will look into future spaces for these.

Back on the University City campus, it has recently become apparent that a campus as clean, orderly and gentrified as ours cannot ever be truly urban. So we’re installing grime misters for the street, sidewalk and buildings, as well as automatically tipping trashcans, E-Z peel paint for our brick buildings and a team of hired actors to play aggressive beggars for that authentic city feel.

And this is just Phase I of President Juan Fry’s new Soviet-style Five-Year Plan. (We say “Soviet-style” to connect to our international students, since we only actively recruit in Communist countries.) Phase II includes refocusing our efforts to grow the endowment.

We’ve been trying to provide the best student experience possible and leave positive impressions on our high-achieving students so they might make a generous donation after graduation, but that is far too slow and respectable. Instead, we are branching out into being a full-fledged real-estate development company and functioning as a tax haven for big spenders.

We developed many partners at a recent international conference to further these efforts, with representatives from places like the Canary Islands, Monaco, the United Arab Emirates and New Jersey.

New developments will include twelve new ultra-luxury hotels; a mixed-use development with executive office suites and a combination Ferrari and Bugatti dealership; two Vegas-style casinos (made possible by our nonprofit status and offering a single part-time unpaid co-op position the casino management program); and a chrome-clad presidential palace on the southwest corner of 33rd and Market streets.

Phase IV will feature the latest roll-out of our campus safety program, featuring 360-degree view high-definition security cameras on all solid surfaces, irremovable GPS tracking chips in all on-campus and online student’s necks and our new guest policy, which is simply called “None.”

Phase V is still being edited, but we have commissioned an artist to create the new cornerstone of campus art: a 50-foot oil painting of President Frito with a ghostly outline of Mario holding a Taser in the background, to be hung on the outside of the University Crossings Housing Block for Comrades.

I think now it is a little more clear how great the changes to campus will be and how much the board of trustees — I mean, student body — will appreciate these great steps forward in Drexel’s legacy.