In this, the sixth updated edition of the PDR, the PDR staff has decided--after much acrimonious debate--to print at the foot of the standard PDR the "student's PDR" that has been circulating for some years now among campus radicals and other undesirables. Since it has proved difficult for professors to obtain copies of this contraband publication, and thus for them to remain as vigilant as proper diagnostic procedure would require, we offer here unaltered, in facsimile form, the entire perfidious document.
It will be noted that the "student's PDR" is a rather disorganized and somewhat trashy hodgepodge of this and that piece of textual flotsam and jetsam; it is difficult for the PDR staff to imagine what sort of editorial policies might have led to the inclusion of any single item. However, our researches indicate that the volume of which this is a facsimile reprint has remained relatively stable for the past five to ten years, and thus represents the "standard" "canon"--if either of those words may properly be employed to describe the editorial nightmare herein reprinted--of The Student's PDR.
The general purpose of The Student's PDR would appear to be to "undermine" or "subvert" the well-established principles of The Professor's Desk Reference; certainly the centrifugal (digressive and rebellious) character of many of the entries would point to such a conclusion. Unfortunately for the "rebels," if that is indeed what they are, or fancy themselves, the material is far too fragmentary and ad hoc to have any such effect. Taken as a whole, The Student's PDR can in no way be read as a concerted attack on Pharmaceutically Assisted Pedagogy; the various authors or editors or compilers of the column seem to have lacked sufficient coherence of editorial vision to undertake any such revolutionary project. To the extent that individual entries in the column are (or seem) subversive, they are so only in the manner that isolated snipers are "subversive" in a world war: as minor irritations to a massively organized and mobilized strategy, easily dealt with and dismissed.
The paltry quantities of extra reading which the inclusion of the student's column betokens should not, therefore, prove overly troubling to the conscientious instructional user of the PDR. The Student's PDR can pose no serious challenge to the serene hegemony of PAP in our nation's institutions of higher education. Still, we believe it at least marginally useful to make this document easily accessible to professors and other university instructors, if for no other reason than to facilitate the swatting of the "flies" and other minor irritations produced by minuscule anti-PAP smear campaigns.
Douglas J. Robinson, Ph.D., editor-in-chief
PDR Research Laboratories
Oxford, Mississippi
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Let us encourage you not to read this Preface to The Student's PDR.
And even more strenuously to avoid the distasteful Student's PDR itself.
Copyright 1993 Doug Robinson, Bill Kaul, and the PDR Labs.