The ensuing scene between Traina and two students is based entirely on a real incident. It was a classic bit of Clarkery. The story goes like this:

 Dave Bernstein was my roommate during the summer of 1996. He was the Program Manager of the campus radio station, and one of the people behind the Multimedia Center proposal, as was I. We had spent all summer trying to find out what the University planned to do with certain spaces around campus, since we needed a place for the Media Center. Traina, for his part, had just moved back onto campus, with extensive fanfare and hype; previously he had lived in a mansion across town, but now he had a mansion right next to the school. One sunday evening, at about 7pm, Dave and a friend of his (who didn't even attend Clark) walked right up to Traina's brand-new house and rang the bell. What transpired is almost exactly like what is described in the book: Dave asked three rather polite questions, and got yelled at and lectured by the University President. All of the dialogue here is faithfully reproduced from Dave's telling of the episode.

  The incident would have been just another private Traina-being-an-asshole story, and quickly forgotten, if not for Traina himself. Two weeks later, when the Scarlet interviewed him about his health, he broke into a feverish rant about students ringing his doorbell. He actually said that if students felt they could approach him "whenever they felt like it, life would be madness." [I would provide a link to the original article, but the Scarlet doesn't have it online. This article, by the way, was parodized beautifully by Dave in our Fall 1996 Scarlet parody issue.] The irony is, nobody outside of our circle of friends knew about the incident, but once Traina mentioned it in the press, it became universally known and a major source of discussion... especially the question of which student it was (I was, as usual, a suspect).

 One of the major reasons this book takes place in late August 1996, instead of March 1997 (when it was written), is so that I could narrate to the student body the details of the then-legendary encounter. (There were other reasons, too, such as particular personnel I wanted to include but who were fired or left during that school year.)

 The epilogue to the story is that towards the end of the year, an email was sent from "RTRAINA" to Student Council complaining about a practical joke I had played. This email was the first correspondence from the President to StudCo in known history, and it rocked the political channels of the school to the foundation. James Gee, Linguistics professor, assigned his socio-linguistics class to do an analysis of the letter. In that class was Zack Ordynans, Dave's best friend (and future Editor of WheatBread), and Zack wrote a paper revealing that the email was a prank and dropping hints as to the culprit. We published that paper in WB#9. The prankster was Dave Bernstein, getting revenge for his treatment from the previous summer.