Freshman year is supposed to be a period of transition. It’s a time to adapt to challenging classes, peculiar roommates, and poor lighting. But this year has been particularly bad, at least the way Caroline Evans TD ’06 tells it. “I don’t understand this place at all. I hate everything about it.”

Caroline’s anxiety is characteristic of the epidemic spreading among the freshman class. Just look at Psychology 110. “Enrollment in the course has dropped from over five hundred students last year to eight this year,” says Professor Peter Salovey. “Perhaps the difficulty of the course scared some of the dimmer students away. I don’t know. I’ve had to lay off six TAs, men with families. One of them was just a few months from retirement.”

According to the Office of the Registrar, only four of the incoming freshmen have registered for classes, and almost a third of them still haven’t arrived on campus. “Turnout has been less than ideal,” admits a spokesman, “but we’re still expecting to get fat off the late registration fees.”

Nobody knows exactly what went wrong this year, but Tom Perkins in the Office of the Dean has a theory. “We were understaffed this summer, and all our efforts were focused on wiring the dorms for cable. As a result, there were… problems, with the summer mailing.” Tom is hesitant to continue, hinting not too subtly that he could “get fired over this.” After a brief but awkward silence, he resumes. “The mailings we send to incoming freshmen contain a lot of information about Yale. In particular, there is an Undergraduate Regulations manual that explains how Yale works, what it’s all about.” He hangs his head. “But the orders were clear… three Spanish channels, no less. We just didn’t have time for the manuals.”

Without an official document to turn to, freshmen have been forced to seek out alternate sources of information about Yale. Hundreds of copies of Link have disappeared from the floor of the Yale Post Office over the last couple of weeks. “I’m pretty psyched. Yale is definitely ‘all that’,” Carly Newsome PC ’06 explains as I admire her new Jeep Wrangler. She asks me if I’ve heard about what happened at Princeton, if I hate Reese Witherspoon, and my IM screen name. I ask her if she knows where WLH is yet.

Those who can scrape by with a modicum of knowledge, and pretend to understand what’s going on, are the lucky ones. They do well in discussion sections, and they do well in life. The rest of us have to do the reading, or things get ugly. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that many in the class of 2006 have considered packing their bags and heading home. “Everything about this place just pisses me off,” says Jean Madros JE ’06. “The dining hall is so far away, and like everyone there is from Morse. And God forbid if you have a social life and can’t make it back to Old Campus by midnight — if I have to climb over the gate one more time, I swear I’m dropping out.”