Let me tell you about Stony Brook, that fine example State sponsored education two hours away from New York City, out in the suburban blandness of Long Island...

Despite having some excellent academic departments, the primary theme of Stony Brook always seems to be "screwed up". The unofficial school slogan was "Stony Brook Sucks." Some people had T-shirts made up with this on it...

A huge place, with an enormous amount of land donated by Ward Melville, I believe, in the late 60s, Nelson Rockefeller, then govenor of New York, pointed his finger, and a furious explosion of construction took place, none of which they could get right.

They were constructing a long bridge connecting the second floor the new Student Union with newly expanded library, but when the bridge reached the library they realized that there was nothing to connect it to. Apparently they flipped the plans over and put the entrance on the wrong side. So they walled off the end of the bridge and it became "The Bridge To Nowhere", the perfect symbol of the university. Many people were annoyed when they eventually put a right turn on the end of it and connected it up with something else.

They were pouring the foundations for this new student union building on the same day that they were pouring the concrete for the walls of the lecture center, and they apparently got the loads of concrete switched... Hence the student union foundations were had problems with cracking and the lecture center turned out a very ugly drab gray color. I often wondered what it was supposed to look like...

The lecture center itself was a very odd building in any case. A big lump of windowless modernistic concrete, often compared to a bomb shelter. Some people seemed very proud of the way it completely avoided the use of right angles in it's structure. Going up the staircases was an interesting vertigo inducing experience: your inner ear tells you you're standing straight up, but the slope of the walls tell you you're leaning over fifteen degrees...

Another classic Stony Brook story: when they built the South Campus Complex, some bright person did an analysis that supposedly proved that installing light switches was a waste of money. Their cost wasn't supposed to be worth the little bit of power saved by turning off florescent lights. But then the seventies rolled around, and you could drive by South Campus at 3 AM, and see the lights blaze away in the midst of the "Energy Crisis".

Then, there's the Health Science Center, a truly gigantic structure, a huge cube formed by a cluster of smaller cubes, all elevated on stilts, visible from miles around. It was not appreciated by the Long Island suburbanites at all. Among my circle of friends it was often compared to Chronos, a big alien robot from some old science fiction movie, and it does indeed have the imposing presence of a Godzilla-class monster... As you walk up to it, there's something deceptive about it's size, you keep thinking you're almost there, but actually it's still bigger and further away than you thought... finally you approach the entrance, and the tremendous cube is looming over you, and you look at the structures great legs... and you realize they're _rusting_. Is this thing safe? Couldn't they afford to paint those legs? It turns out that the architects _wanted_ them to look that way. They put a cladding on the pillars that was intended to rust, which is sometimes used to give things a kind of soft, natural appearence (on a high-tech science fictional concrete cube? Don't ask me, I'm no architect).

One story I've heard about the Health Science Center: they installed a large number of ventilating fans, mounted on the roof, all of them wired to start at the same time. The combined torque of these things accelerating was apparently enough to make the building creak (think about the stability of a huge cube up on stilts...). The solution: they replaced half of the motors with models that spin in the opposite direction, so they would cancel the effect of the other motors.

But my absolute favorite story about the Health Science Center: as originally constructed, they forgot to include a morgue. Cadavers had to be refrigerated in the cafeteria facilities... I understand they didn't fix this problem until they built an adjacent hospital complex...

But I've just been talking about the problems with the buildings at Stony Brook. There's more to a university than just buildings, right? For example, there was the time the adminstration decided to make a change in the rules concerning continuing housing on campus. If you wanted to stay where you were, you needed to get a certain form stamped... on the ONE particular day they set aside for this process. _Thousands_ of people mobbed the adminstration building, forming a line a mile long with a completely stationary tail, since more people were cutting the line than standing in it. What was this all about? Why did anyone think this proceedure was necessary or desireable? An amazing place.

The year that I graduated, a new President wanted to hold a single, university wide graduation ceremony, rather than the smaller departmental graduations they had been doing. The only place remotely big enough to hold an entire graduating class at Stony Brook was the football field, which is where they decided to do it (Stony Brook is not exactly a big football school, and having thousands of people trampling the football field wasn't as unthinkable as it would be some other places). Reporters for the school newspaper interviewed the adminstration, asking them about rain-out plans. They said "For something like this, you just have to assume that it isn't going to rain." So of course, it does. Nearly everyone left early, except for a small hardcore crowd that clustered up front by the stage, heckling the speakers, and chanting in unison "Stony Brook Sucks! Stony Brook Sucks!"

Too bad I missed the ceremony. A more fitting expression of the Stony Brook spirit, I can't imagine. I'm not very big on graduation ceremonies. Skipped it for both college and grad school. Ditto high school (I fell asleep that afternoon, and wasn't there to pick up the award they tried to give me.)

Need to go into the upside, though, e.g. virtues of a school which takes pride in a bad attitude. Very little football bullshit. Very little fraternity nonsense. Some twits wanted to start a fraternity once, and they were roundly ignored.

The virtues of anonymity: You study the stuff, take the tests, and get your grades, with no worries that the prof will get pissed off if you skip classes, show up late, don't cut your hair, etc. Some people complain about a lack of personal contact in these places, but when personal contact disappears you also lose many other things: favoritism, prejudice...

Found at:
http://www.grin.net/~mirthles/doomfiles/SUNY.html