We all know it, we’ve walked past it a thousand times — University Hall, the icon of Brown. If you don’t know it, it’s the huge building on the Main Green with the bell and the bricks, and you should probably stop taking the shortcut through the Leeds Breezeway. Beyond its purpose as a home for administrative and presidential goings-on, the College Edifice (its original moniker), built in 1770, can be traced back to the establishment of Brown in Providence. Once the lone behemoth on College Hill, University Hall has nestled in among the high rises and beautiful parking lots of the city, serving as a beacon of knowledge and intellect for all who make the trek up College Street.

As Brown’s first and oldest building, University Hall has seen its fair share of ups and downs over the course of the school’s nearly 250-year history. Brown was a bit lazy in its design and modeled the building after Nassau Hall at Princeton, the alma mater of Brown’s first president, Reverend James Manning. Controversy surrounds the construction of the building, as Corporation records denote the possible use of slaves in the work force. Once completed, the building held the students’ quarters, mess hall, chapel and classrooms until the construction of Hope College in 1822. It was at this time that the College Edifice was renamed University Hall. (Note: Why isn’t the word ‘edifice’ used more often? #18thcenturynostalgia #swag). [Read more →]

The thing that’s so irksome about freshmen — or “first-years,” if you’re a Gender Studies concentrator — is that they are having more fun than you. The rest of us are weary from their loud bursts of ecstatic liberty; freshman are newly free, yet safely cooped up beneath the big Brown shelter — and they want the world to know.

Then it’s over and bam!: you’re an upperclassmen and you abruptly inherit the solemn duty of mocking them, the fun-havers. Lucky for us, it turns out that teasing the newcomers is a lot of fun.

But our Brown impulse to deride the Young and Gradeless used to be much crueler. For this Blog edition of Ra Ra Brunonia we turn to the aptly called Encyclopedia Brunoniana by Martha Mitchell. According to Mitchell, since 1907, Brown’s Cammarian Club, a selective and elite cabal (and early student government), mandated that all first year students don a special brand of beanie called Eton caps. These things were fucking awful. They were, essentially, small brown-colored skullcaps. These harsh hats were unflattering, unfashionable, and, most crucially, marked you as a fun-haver — which meant your smug freshman head belonged in a toilet. [Read more →]

Procrastination is both a value and a vice. In order to make it productive, we’ve provided you with a few quick facts that you probably didn’t know. Learn a new thing every day in higher education with BlogDailyHerald.

Library desk chairs cost $800. That black chair you’re sitting on right now? With the great lumbar support, height adjustment and super sprite wheels? It cost lots of dolladolla bills, according to Amazon. No wonder tuition keeps rising — we need places to keep our butts warm! Let’s hope Brown got a wholesale price.

Happy right now? Probably not, potentially in part because Rhode Island drinking laws prohibit bars from holding happy hours (and because you have finals, duh). Additionally, Rhode Island law prohibits the acceptance of out-of-state state identification cards — only licenses allowed. NYC drivers (and “drivers“), you should probably think about taking your road test.

What time is it? Game time! The new cupola on the Nelson Fitness Center formerly sat atop Marvel Gym, which used to stand across from Brown Stadium. The clock’s face does not have numbers, but instead reads A-L-D-R-I-C-H-F-I-E-L-D, where it had been located.  Fun fact: the bronze bear that stands on the Main Green also used to ornament the gym. Ra Ra Brunonia, FTW!

2/3 of grades awarded at Brown are A’s…? As you struggle in the library right now, this statistic is probably mocking your greater sensibilities. Last we checked, it was more like 54%. Try to keep the rumor going, though, and maybe you’ll help your GPA — get back to work!

Today at 4 pm, the Brown University Community Council will be holding a meeting in the Kasper Multipurpose Room in Faunce.  It will be addressing the Athletics Review Committee Report published earlier in the year, which recommended the discontinuation of skiing, wrestling, and fencing as varsity sports, resulting in a widespread pushback from Brown students.

According to its website, the Brown University Community Council:

serves as a university-wide representative forum for discussion, debate, and advisory recommendations on a wide spectrum of issues and concerns.  It may, at its discretion, consider and advance questions of University community policy, the governing of the University, and issues related to the overall welfare of the University; and to make recommendations regarding any such matters to the appropriate decision-making bodies of the University or to the appropriate officers of the University.

Membership of the BUCC is comprised of 4 students, including UCS President Ralanda Nelson, President Simmons, Provost Schlissel, members of the faculty, two alumni and university administrators.  Its decision will be brought forward at the Corporation meeting in October.  Think about what you would recommend if you were a member of the committee, and feel free to attend, as it is open to all students.

Comment below with your thoughts, opinions, and recommendations.

While Brown may not boast secret societies as well-known or proliferate as Skull and Bones, it does have one known society on campus: Pacifica House.  In typical Brown fashion, “Societas Domi Pacificae” operates relatively transparently – it has its own website and e-mail address.  Pacifica House remains a bit of an enigma on Brown University’s campus, but it is host to about 15 of the leading seniors on campus – people who have displayed leadership in some central extracurriculars, and, well, the rest is a secret.  Founded in 1824, Pacifica House has a historical association with the Cammarian Club, a university club that has since been succeeded by the Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS).

Pacifica House, while exercising little role in campus policies or politics, tends to make its presence known with a variety of mysterious publications each year.  Two years ago, it inserted an extended critique of shopping period in the BDH.  Last year, it inserted enigmatic flyers in the student body mailboxes about fall weekend (better known as Columbus Day).  The organization seems to sustain itself on the sheer force of momentum with few productive ends, but then again, who doesn’t enjoy to loaf now and again?

**Author’s Note: 10 points and bragging rights to anyone who can unearth the contemporary link between UCS and Pacifica Society

Robinson Hall (1878), the Economics Department Building, was once the university’s main library

Flashback to your high school graduation: you walked confidently to the front of your capped-and-gowned class, picked up your diploma, and walked out of school forever.  A future of literally limitless possibilities at the top of College Hill was an option welcomed with open arms after years of college-driven course choices — until pre-registration. Then freshmen inevitably realized Brown’s curriculum pretty much meant they were all utterly overwhelmed and totally screwed.

Cue the entrance of those angels in punny shirts we like to call the Meiklejohns.  Unlike the professorial advisors who offered a few vague words of encouragement, Meiklejohns came to the rescue with the real dirt, including advice like which professors were snooze-worthy, who delivered captivating lectures, which classes were way too difficult for first-semester students, and reasons why you shouldn’t take that 9 a.m.  As the new college student breathed a sigh of relief, a string of questions must have fleetingly crossed his mind — where does the word “meiklejohn” come from? Should I get my lactaid pills? Who is John?

[Read more →]

??

Who is this brilliant man who brought us the “Spicy-With,” the “chicken carb(erry),” and consequently the 15 pounds that have clung to our formerly slight freshman frames? What brilliance created a place for Brown students to go when we seek to soak up alcohol with greasy food or alleviate our sorrow by looting Uncrustables? Who/What is Josiah Carberry?

Josiah Stinkney Carberry is a traveler. He is a professor.  He is you. He is me.  He is Brown University’s residential house elf (?).  As swiftly as a genie is released from a bottle or Mary Poppins emerges from the sky, Josiah Carberry popped on the scene at Brown University.  His existence can be marked back to 1929, when he was scheduled to give a lecture on “Archaic Greek Architectural Revetments in Connection with Ionian Philology.” People interested in the lecture were told to contact Professor John Spaeth, who when prodded for more information on the mysterious new professor, mentioned other members of Carberry’s family, including a puffin-huntingdaughter and Carberry’s assistant Truman Grayson, who had a knack for being bitten by things beginning with the letter, “A.” [Read more →]

Faunce House - June 2009

For those of you who have come to this school for the prospect of an “enclave of trustafarians and children of celebrities” who “major in drum circles and semiotics,” you may have skimped on your Brown education.  While academic offerings can teach you about the psychology of making decisions and your daily dosage of sleep (8.4 hours), this new column will give you a taste of the history you walk through every day and, hopefully, a new appreciation for College Hill, past and present.  As President Henry Wriston said,* “no student can walk the paths of the College Green for four years … without learning something from the appearance, something from the atmosphere that its buildings breathe, something from the way history looks down upon him…”

[Read more →]

Pictured: Grad Center, the site of famous weed-and-fireworks parties. Kim Perley / Herald

The Corporation convening on College Hill this weekend is not, for better or for worse, the same as the “Corporation” with 400 customers which sold pot, hashish and acid on campus in the early 1970s.

Details of this Corporation’s operations were printed in a disdainful-quotation-mark-filled May 1971 Providence Journal article based on an interview with a student who identified himself as the group’s president. The prez told tales of wild “pot parties” with 400 people and fireworks on the Grad Center terrace, chemistry PhDs inspecting their supplies, and marijuana sold at $15 an ounce — yeah, right, and hamburgers for a nickel!

The unabashed leader of the University’s “highest” governing body told the Journal his merry band was dissolving after two years because they were all graduating. “I’ve even vacuumed my room several times,” he said. Still, he had no regrets about his enterprise or his middling profits due to giving away free samples: “We should have made more than $20,000, but it was more fun this way,” the anonymous dealer said.