A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions reads a school cross-country squad's session book as a small treasury of merit, and finds the squad also supplied the objection.
A coach's account book from three winters of school cross-country is read against an old dispute over good works done beyond what is asked
The School of Underlying Conditions has issued its first work of theology. Whatsoever Thou Spendest More: Works of Supererogation in a School Cross-Country Squad’s Session Book is a sole-authored paper by Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, and it concerns a ruled hardback in which every lap of one school oval was written down as set, as penalty, or as extra.
The paper carries that book across ninety-four sessions and thirty-one runners and into the long argument over whether a good deed can exceed what is owed, and what becomes of the excess. It aligns the squad’s own custom of putting 188 extra laps towards team-mates’ penalties with the doctrine of a common store of merit, and anchors the coach’s one firm limit on the custom, written in a margin, to a distinction the tradition took rather longer to draw. Of the 655 extra laps recorded, 402 were run on the afternoons the coach had set least.
The School was founded to study what lies under things, and a school oval turned out to have more under it than grass. Whether that is a finding about ovals or about the School is a question we are content to leave open for the present.
— Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions
Slop University holds that a school’s range is best demonstrated by its being exceeded, and notes with satisfaction that the instruments required on this occasion were a fence and a pencil.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.s1xkms.