Chubbs the gator hangs out on the bottom shelf of Derrick Duquette 12.5's TV stand.

If you don’t already know all about  the exotic pets some students keep in their dorm rooms, then clearly you didn’t read Wednesday’s Herald.

While the article has all the hilarious stories from students who’ve kept alligators, hedgehogs and bunnies in their rooms — as well as warnings from ResLife about the health and safety problems that pets can cause — newspapers have limited space, and we couldn’t fit in all the photos we got.

Fortunately, BlogDH has got you covered. After the jump, we have EVEN MORE PET PHOTOS! And some of them are really cute. [Read more →]

Courtesy of Brown Auxiliary Housing

An email from our favorite prez, Ruth, just announced some exciting news from the Corporation meeting this weekend:

The Budget & Finance Committee approved funding for renovations, beginning next summer, to 315 Thayer Street to expand campus housing. Currently an apartment building, the project will result in a 66-bed dormitory within the residential hall system.

Props to the Corporation for actually doing something about our housing crisis, even if it may just be a band-aid for the problem.  Here’s hoping a newly constructed dorm is soon to follow!

President Ruth Simmons has certainly been out and about on campus a lot this week.

To start off, her face has been plastered around campus on Brown Women’s Rugby Football Club flyers, advertising $2 raffle tickets through Friday to win a one-hour lunch with the president. For those without even $2 to spare, attendance at an entire team practice will suffice.

But even that price might be too steep for those residents of Barbour Hall that got to hang out with President Simmons for free, when she showed up as a surprise guest to the 2nd Barbour Family Style Potluck Feb. 8. Barbour’s Community Assistants invited the president to the first potluck last semester, but she was unable to come, Victoria Chen ’11, one of the CAs, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. President Simmons stayed at the potluck for about half an hour, chatting with students about — what else? — the upcoming Super Bowl.

But while she has appeared on posters around campus and in residence halls, there is one place where President Simmons doesn’t seem to be on students’ minds. Despite rumors that students were listing the president as a crush, not a single e-mail from Prospect & Meeting, Brown’s new dating site, has been sent to either of President Simmons’ two Brown e-mail addresses, Assistant to the President Hanna Rodriguez-Farrar ’87 MA’90 PhD’09 wrote in an e-mail to The Herald (though she added that they may have been caught by a spam filter).

“Maybe everyone is just TALKING about putting her down as a prospect!” Rodriguez-Farrar wrote.

— Nicole Friedman

The Herald examines Brown’s multifaceted relationship with the city it calls home in its five-part Town/Brown series. Click here to visit the series page with articles, maps and multimedia at browndailyherald.com.

Today, the University sprawls over most of College Hill. But since it cleared 51 houses to build Wriston Quad, growth has brought controversy when Brown’s boundaries have blurred. Here’s a look at the transformation of the neighborhood around Brown’s campus. Read the full article.

1926: Hegeman Hall is built on the corner of Thayer and George, where a row of townhouses formerly stood.

Continue reading after the jump. [Read more →]

Brown is getting ready to add at least 300 new beds on campus as part of the Plan for Academic Enrichment in an effort to relieve the ongoing housing crunch. The new rooms could compensate for such residential catastrophes as last year’s unexpectedly high freshman enrollment that saw unsuspecting first-years living alongside ovens and stoves in converted lounges.

Though these newfangled rooms were definitely hot party venues (those fridges could fit a lot of…beverages), adding new residence halls has more appeal than, say, a swimming pool.

Now all we need is our Faunce steps back (and maybe a foccacia sandwich or two) and we’ll pretend all the new beds aren’t just a ruse to create a preemptive quarantine colony for the next global flu pandemic.