I returned to Brown this weekend, and I used the bathroom next to the Gate. While seated upon that throne, I began busying my eyes with the scribblings by students smattered about the walls. Nothing much to report, except a strange ranting by some loony about how President Bush blew up the World Trade Centers. There were a few uninteresting things here and there as well. While I could lament the lack of interesting content on the bathroom walls, invoking my 4-year stint at the college, lamenting the loss of creative writing in the bathrooms, I don’t want to overstate the romanticness of my undergraduate education.
Moreover, I’ve learned that everyone thinks their class was the last smart class ever to have gone to the University. And that will be the case from now until the day that Brown decides to remember the standards it was once known for with regard to selecting students. Alas, being an inferior science school (like Ruth Simmons wants) rather than improving our Classical, Liberal arts tradition will have a chilling effect on the kinds of students that apply to a school like Brown – no matter the school’s name recognition.
In my day, the walls of the bathroom’s stalls were painted in anti-George Bush rhetoric. And, while I got a kick out of all the unintelligible platitudes (“No Blood for oil”, “Bush lied, people died”, “Education is a right”…”3=====D”) that I’d regularly see all over the wall, I much prefer the bathroom poetry that I’d occasionally run into: Here I sit all broken hearted/Came to $#I%/But only farted; pure Shakespeare. (Yes ladies and gentlemen, I used a colon and a semicolon in the same sentence. I am Ivy League Edumucated.)