Lunatic U

In small towns or countries, Universities produce a subset of individuals with tenuous connection to reality. When that connection snaps, the individual receives tenure. Small towns become University towns where economic activity depends upon the campus; this leads to the Campus Poobah having the influence of the Pope on Rome.

In small countries, the University is looked to as a source of enlightenment. Tenured personnel, with their less than tenuous grip on reality, are revered as "experts". It is odious, (putting it mildly) to live in a small town where persons incapable of functioning in the real world take sanctuary behind "ivy halls".

It is chaffing, (again, putting it mildly) to live in a small country where buffoons who can not gain a real job create academic bailiwicks where they posture and pontificate as their droolings become canon. And then there is Tranquility University on Luna. It started as Tranq Training center until a power hungry primary school administrator saw the potential and began slapping courses together to make a curriculum. This was followed by pressuring our "government" (so-called) to grant accreditation to "our" University.

This enabled a coven of obnoxious power mad little people with Nero syndrome who assumed 'Nature abhors a vacuum' (though there's one on the surface) to fill it with bogasity. The Lunar colony started as a waste of resources to prove the toughness of the human spirit and how much better it is to filth up a pristine blob of rock which was lifeless anyway, than Earth.

The protocols worked because they were snatched from the pages of respectable sci-fi novels which created, populated and organised underground caverns as a closed eco-system. I liked the idea. I liked using all those stories I read as a kid, (read as if they were pornography having to be hidden behind acceptable literary offerings) as our manual.

The astronaut/engineers from their Quonset huts on the Moon's surface built a burrowing machine. They began digging corridors one hundred meters below the surface. They used the moon dust to fill prefab steel reinforced plastic segments; easy to assemble as a set of leggos with groove and tongue, attaching pre built panels for electricity and plumbing, creating a kilometer long tunnel with removable portals for expansion when necessary. The first corridor, called Long Cellar, proved humans could create a livable environment.

The Original industry was soil production. This was done by carting a trailerload of topsoil from Earth, mixing it with equal parts moon dust and locally produced waste, troweling it into beds three centimeters deep one meter wide with a half meter between them similar to the design by Bradberry. A few thousand imported Earth worms were added so the dead half meter would slowly become productive soil able to sustain the planting of useful seeds.

Seeds equal plants, plants equal oxygen. Oxygen equals life; so provide some. You won't find any document which describes the first Luna migrants as useless people. They'll use every possible euphenism, but sift it to the fact we are talking useless people Earth was happy to lose.

In primitive societies, euthanasia would be the method to get rid of them, in ours, send them to the moon. Hundreds of Long Cellars, much better than the first, were built with bush lined "streets", plastic Quonset hut houses, a few businesses like Bars, and the Earth rejects lived happily. Then Bureaucracy was born. Cellars now hosted "Government" offices, which employed "government" workers who needed housing.

Then schools for the kids, jobs for the spouses, recreation, and we got Tranquility City; the largest rat burrow in the galaxy. Being a colony isn't a bad status if you can get it. You are responsible for very little; the Mother country is.

It's an extended adolescence where you do pretty much what you want and your parents pay the bills. The the power mad saw the vacuum, decided to fill it. Verbiage spewed over local broadcasts. The idea was to morph Tranquility Base Technical Training Center into a University.

At inception, the burrow holding the Training Center was separate from other holes as they had a lot of dangerous equipment. The explosion of a compressor could kill everyone on Luna which is why their hole was two klics from the other Cellars.

The mental midgets who mooted the establishment of a University changed this reason for separation into a "need to preserve intellectual purity". The idea of an Intellectual Oasis on the Moon was so popular Nobel Prize winners were flying up from Earth to teach at Tranq University. Every department had it's Eminent Head and it was not unlikely Tranquility University would be the pinnacle of Academia.

This was not what the locals had in mind. Campus politics are different from national politics by sheer viciousness. The effort locals put into getting rid of "foreign" professors could have repulsed the hordes of Ghengis Khan. Of course, it was done subtly, with the artistic use of words until the term "Non-Lunite" was said in the voice of "pederest" or "cannibal".