In an unexpected turn of events, Chancellor Henry T. Yang has announced that the UC Santa Barbara campus’ new classroom building will actually serve as a Chuck E. Cheese Pizzeria and Arcade. In a campus-wide email sent from the Office of the Chancellor earlier this week, Yang went into detail regarding the future of the building, saying that UCSB now owns all intellectual property associated with the Chuck. E Cheese brand due to the pizza corporation filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. 

Describing the acquisition as, “totally accidental,” Yang reports believing that he was buying GME. Still, he says the acquisition was “easily the best $10 million of COVID-19 relief [he’s] ever spent.” 

With construction well underway, Yang expects the new building to function as both classroom facilities and a Family Fun Space Where a Kid Can Be a Kid®, cementing the UCSB name as a greater vanguard of children’s entertainment than ever before. The building will also house the nascent Department of Entertainment and Cheese Studies. According to the new (but somehow Web-1.0) chuckcheese.ucsb.edu domain, the titular rodent’s middle initial, “E”, stands for Entertainment, but his last name, Cheese, is only coincidental.

Test runs have begun in Campbell Hall to explore overlapping business hours with a lecture schedule. However, many students have filed complaints about screaming toddlers and popping birthday balloons. One Environmental Studies student complained, “When I get home, I have to scrape the ball pit cheese off my feet as soon as I walk in the door, or else my dog will eat it. And I’ve made so much progress with not kicking my dog. I’ve relapsed. This is on you, Yang” 

Another student, visibly excited about the change, went into detail regarding the building’s dual functionality: “They installed Scantron readers in the Ticket Munchers. Imagine having to finish a midterm when you hear six separate kiosks chewing away in stereo. End me.” 

Professors have also found difficulty in the presence of the almighty rat. A psychology professor reports discomfort sharing a space with an animatronic rock band, saying, “I have to stop my lectures every ten minutes for the rat to play some shitty cover of Rush’s 2112.” The professor also confessed, “… but it’s worse when they stop. Their bodies freeze but their eyes just keep moving.” 

Customers of the Campbell Hall test run have chimed a different tune, finding the UCSB campus less desirable to attend than the typical Chuck E. Cheese strip mall locale. A single father of three responded, “There’s a coke operation being run in the climbing tubes. Not to insinuate anything, but the Alcohol and Drug Program counselors have been surprisingly absent. I’m just saying, quarantine was harder on some of us. But you didn’t hear it from me.”

A second email from the Office of the Chancellor has responded to the flood of community members’ aggressively reasonable concerns, addressing UCSB’s future as an edutainment conglomerate. “We all react to news like this differently,” the email reads, “You might feel sad, afraid, or even numb. All of those are natural, emotional responses.” 

With so many questions left unanswered by the Chancellor, and the construction of the Chuck E. Classroom Building having several more years until full completion, the shadow of Charles Entertainment Cheese stands firm and throbbing over the campus community.