Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 19, 2020

Please remember, this does NOT mean that Walden is a diploma mill.

My high school diploma is still kept in the Sociology secretariat of the University of Turin, since 1976. All I have is a photocopy. It never served me.

I remember a time when you graduated from college in four years!!! Of course, my student deferment was good for only four years.

Trump University just sends “good vibes” (as long as you’re paid up).

My diploma folder is empty. Darn math class. Oh well that was back in 1960, I had other things to do….

Hmmm, old enough to remember Mimeographs,Fordigraphs, and Gestetner too.

Does anyone remember hectographs? We “published” our family newspaper that way.

I wonder if that mimeograph still has that smell?

I remember how sad I was the first time I saw how my diploma was a sad piece of paper with nothing nice printed on it.

PDF or Mimeograph still not worth the paper it’s printed on.

Why “to print out”? Why not just “to print”? What je ne sais quoi does “out” add to “print”? How do these silly phrasal buzz-verbs come about? Does ANYONE believe that “out” adds ANYTHING to “print”? It’s certainly a fashionable and voguish affectation, but not at all substantive or essential. It’s a new area for Mrs Malaprop to develop.

When did Sam last appear? She’s gotten big.

Purple is not mimeo, it’s spirit lithography, aka ditto. The sweet fragrance of fresh printed homework came from the acetone-like solvent that loosened up the ink from the ditto master to print off on each page. There’d be forty or maybe fewer ‘good’ copies, then you’d get some number of mediocre ones, and then… well, ditto was the best argument for smaller class sizes.

I used to type and draw my apazines on ditto every month and send them off to be printed and collated. Later on, I worked in a college department, typing in four languages on the things, making corrections with the corner of a razor blade after striking over with the right letter. When the department got a typewriter with memory (A WHOPPING FOUR PAGES), I could get everything right before putting the ditto master in. The blessings of technology!

While it was self-typing the master, I’d pretend to be typing with one hand for the entertainment of the teachers.

Wonder if it still has that smell. What’s the half-life of mimeograph ink odor, anyway?

It doesn’t matter. You graduated. The doors are open. Just walk through the best one you can find and put college behind you.

Mimeographed or hand drawn with a quill pen on parchment, its still just a piece of paper. Pomp & ceremony with caps & gowns or a simple email congratulation – they both hold little meaning. The only true value of those years of education lies within your head; and that’s what is going to get you a job and bring success. Of course there are always exceptions: One persnickety client asked for proof of the letters behind our names; and I had to ask my university to send a replacement for the diploma I had lost.

Any way you look at it, it’s just a piece of paper.

I loved the smell of mimeograph ink in the morning.

Mimeograph? Ahh, that brings back memories. Turning the crank, checking the paper, checking the copies, getting a little woozy on the fumes. Has anyone else ever used a mimeo? I ask, as it was 60 years ago for me. (60 years? How is that even possible?)

Figures that Walden would have still been using mimeographs in the mid 1980s.

The graduating classes of 2020 are losing out on the pomp and circumstance and partying that are part of the celebration of such a monumental milestone. The fallout from COVID-19 and the education repercussions will be affecting the world for years to come!

Spirit copy was purple mimeograph was black.

Actually, it was the ditto machine (aka spirit duplicator) that (usually) printed in purple (and didn’t use actual ink!). The mimeograph machine (aka stencil duplicator) generally used black ink. They were two different processes. I used both of them quite a bit back in junior high (what today they call middle school), being the editor of the school newspaper.

Um, psst, you can edit PDF’s, you know… ☺

Ditto is purple. Mimeograph is black.

6 years?

Cheer up, Sam, you could have graduated from Trump U.! The future still belongs to you and your generation, remember that!

Mimeographs would be fine for many purposes now — and would be a huge cost & energy saver compared to laser printers & toner. Phasing them out served one purpose: To make money for the printer & toner companies.

I did not go to my graduation ceremony and never bothered to pick up my diploma. That was in the 1950s. It made no difference as long as the school had the records. Anyone really interested in whether you graduated simply checks with the school anyway.

boring.

Man, that sucks! And with a PDF, you can’t even Photoshop it… :D

I didn’t realize Sam was old enough to be a college graduate. I notice she mentioned it took her six years – I wonder what the story was behind that? A master’s degree? Working her way through school and spreading out her course work over more years?

Mimeograph was normally black – you could select the ink – Fluid duplicator was purple

I remember attending a performance of Animal House with a bunch of my buddies, and when they got to the part where Bluto (John Belushi) was complaining about having been expelled — “6 years of college down the drain!” — they all laffed. It took me awhile to catch on that normal people thot that was a long time. (Took me 9, and I’d probably still be there if the VP for Academic Affairs hadn’t called me into his office one day and let me know that I’d already piled up enuf credits in 3 of my non-major subjects to have earned a bachelor’s degree with double minor, and he wanted me to finally face the real world. That’s why I’m one of the few history majors with a BS instead of a BA.)

why do Boopsies eyes look like she’s been doing meth?

Both of my college diplomas were really nice. But ask me where they are now—I have no idea.

Now I’m thoroughly confused. I thought he and Boopsie broke up years ago, and she took up with Zeke, and he married Kim?, and Sam went to MIT. Even if there is a time warp, this strip doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere in the timeline. Am I just mixing up some different characters?

At my high school, where I was a teacher’s assistant for an hour a day in lieu of study hall, the mimeograph ink was black. The ditto process was purple. Unattributed copy and paste: “the ditto machine (spirit duplicator) and mimeograph (stencil duplicator) were competing technologies in the document-copying market.” I also used carbon paper, in fact if you used onion skin paper you could type an original and TWO copies with carbon paper (my mom taught me this.) Early in my business career, as a trainee, I got to make copies on the Ozalid machine which used ammonia to print blueprints from plastic original formats filled in with wax pencil. Yes, I am old children.

I’ve been getting DVDs of the old TV show Community. In the opening episode, “Jeff” is telling a friend that teaches at the college that he has to get a bachelor’s degree.

“I thought you had a degree from Columbia.”

“Well, now I need one from America. And one that’s not an email attachment.”

. The power of the press for the underground during World War II and later, even in the East Village in the ‘60s was the Mimeograph. A stencil was cut by typing, the inside of the drum was filled with printer’s ink, and you could run hundreds of copies, sometimes more.. The purple ink was from a Hectograph. It was a plain piece of paper backed by gelatin colored with gentian violet. Placed on a drum, the inked face was dampened by alcohol which then transferred to print the page. Usually not good for more than 30 copies – 50 if you didn’t care which poor student got an exam and couldn’t read the questions. (But you could get a contact high running lots of them in a tiny room.)

I’m so glad my daughter received a beautiful diploma from SCAD Atlanta in June 2020. Summa cum laude. It’s all over, for now anyway.

…you’d get an invoice

I have three diplomas, and they’re all somewhere in file boxes surrounding me in my home office. If I had a .pdf copy, it would be much more accessible.

On my office wall, where most people would’ve mounted a college diploma, is the proudly framed certificate of dismissal of 71-CR-71 (USDC, Western District of Wisconsin), United States of America v. Richard Steven Russell. Took me longer to earn that than my college degree, and it meant way more to me, too, I assure you.

Has anyone else remarked on how mellow BD has gotten thru the years?

Wait a minute – “Record doesn’t matter”?? From the coach??? Sorry, GT – try as I might I just can’t suspend disbelief that much.

Something that periodically strikes me as odd: If B.D. and Boopsie live in Connecticut, how is Sid the Agent able to periodically drop by unannounced? I mean, no matter how much money you have, airplane trips use up a lot of time. Which is also money except that it can’t be spent on airplane trips.

Or maybe he hasn’t done that since they moved from California to Connecticut and I’m only recalling strips from prior to the move. Hm.

I know what she means, My wife got her degree after thirty + years and planned on hanging it next to mine on the wall. When she got it, she was horrified to find that it was a mass produced inkjet printing. The president of the university and chancellor’s signatures weren’t even real. Pretty cheesy. I called and told them that I thought it was pretty lame for something we had paid over $60,000.00 and 2 1/2 years of her life spent working a full time job, then coming home to a quick meal before spending the rest of the evening sitting in front of the computer. I completed three degrees during my navy career courtesy of Uncle Sam and she went through a lot more going the home learning thing. I am so proud of her, and to see how disappointed she was was heartbreaking. I shamed them into providing a real diploma with real signatures and had it professionally framed. It hangs on the wall to this day.

Doesn’t matter. That paper only gets you through the door. You’ll learn more in the first 6 months on the job than in all those years of school.

My college graduation was the traditional cap-and-gown ritual. I wanted not to shake hands with the college president (he had given a number of us a hard time over the years), but he had a sort of diploma-in-left-hand-right-hand-outreached that made this difficult.

My “graduation” from UC Berkeley (27,500 students total at the time) as in absentia. We got letters from the administration: “You don’t really want to attend graduation, do you? It’ll be hot and there will be zillions of undergraduates ahead of you. Why not just fill in this form, and, a couple of weeks after school ends, go to window 37 in the Registrar’s office and pick up your diploma.”

If it’s purple, it’s spirit duplicator (“ditto”), not mimeograph. I’m an old science fiction fanzine guy, and still have a spirit duplicator in my office.

How strange. I got diplomas from a junior college and a four-year state college, and they looked nice. Then I got a diploma from a major University, and the printing was crappy.