As a bit of a respite from the anticipated dreadfulness of the six-ish weeks leading up to Election Day, let’s take a break and reflect on something else.

If attention getting is your goal – and yes, attention getting is LibertyPell’s goal – your friendly local publicist will quickly advise you to focus some phony philanthropy on the downtrodden.

This has been especially successful for old farts like Bono and Bill Clinton whose alternative is to hold hands in a Cialis bathtub commercial.

The problem with this advice is that most of the good downtrodden are already taken.

Since LibertyPell can afford neither a proper class of downtrodden nor the services of even the most disgraced of publicists, we must graze about in the dumpsters of the less sympathetic downtrodden.

Hence we consider today the plight of chief marketing officers at America’s elite colleges.

The first problem we face is that they are not really downtrodden. In fact they are pretty well paid for their efforts to fill the seats in upcoming freshperson classes. Since they are not actually downtrodden, we must spin a relative decrease in uptroddenness into a grievous “condition.”

In other words, things are not as good as they used to be for the chief marketing officers at America’s elite colleges.

The high water marks for college marketing officers were the US News and World Report college rankings and the SUV window sticker.

The giants of the college marketing industry created these in anticipation of two trends that are deeply unpopular in the faculties of the colleges they market.

The first of these unpopular trends emerged from the biology departments.

In a shocking development, it appears that capable and well-educated young ladies prefer to mate with capable and well-educated young gentlemen. Though arriving later at this conclusion (often with a bit of nudging from capable and well-educated young ladies), young gentlemen feel the same way. This has created not only a tsunami of children who might well be both capable and educable, but also a cohort of type A mothers and fathers who believe this to be the case.

The second emerged from economics departments.

The target audience for college marketers is upwardly mobile, type A and competitive. What better to aim for than a prestigious college decal on the back window of the Chevy Tahoe?

Here are the top-20 National universities (including some ties): Princeton, Harvard, Chicago, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Penn, Hopkins, Dartmouth, Cal Tech, Northwestern, Brown, Cornell, Rice, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Washington University, Emory, Georgetown and Berkeley.

The relevant SUV stickers are, of course, identical.

If rankings and SUV stickers are the high points, what is getting in the way of the continued success and happiness of the elite college marketing officers?

In the words of one practitioner of the dark arts of college bamboozling, “the fucking faculty, the pusillanimous students and the spineless deans.”

How do you sell fast tracks to partnership at Goldman Sachs, superior mating opportunities and Halloween hijinks when the reality is micro-aggression, safe spaces and trigger warnings?

Or the recently introduced ball pit?

What is the value of the Brown SUV sticker when that esteemed institution spends mummy’s tuition dollars installing tampon dispensers in the gender-neutral men’s rooms? And makes them available free to remedy millennia of gender oppression?

Is your SUV sticker extolling family admission success diminished when the other tennis ladies find out about the latest silliness at your child’s high-end college?

As is evident from the picture above, the very existence of the prestigious stickers might be at risk if the little darlings come away believing the crap they are being taught.

So, please join libertyPell as we champion the cause of the beleaguered elite college marketing officers. The charity ball will be $1000 a pop.