Off the Top of My Head Online (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} otmh) wrote,@ 2006-04-09 17:24:00 |
|
April 11, 2006 - WPI Perversely Intriguing
I spent a year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. As so often happens with relationships these days, it didn't work out very well between us - WPI wanted too much money and I didn't have the maturity for a real commitment back then. Still, we had some good times.
WPI is kind of a peculiar school, which is probably a reflection of the fact that Worcester is kind of a peculiar town. A sign that was seen for many years on the side of a warehouse next to the Interstate downtown announced that, while every great American city has a college, Worcester has ten - which was quite true, and yet if there's a place in America that's less the typical college town, it's Worcester. A lot of people get down on Worcester for being grim and grubby and post-industrial, but I've always had a sort of contratian fondness for it.
The same also holds for WPI. It's quirky and in some ways really rather deficient - and more so when I was a student there - but it somehow managed to inspire a loyalty that's never really left me. In a strange way, a lot of the school's flaws and annoyances became perverse points of pride to me and a number of my schoolmates of the day.
Being a primarily technical school in the American Northeast, WPI draws a lot of comparisons to its much more famous cousin in Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Those comparisons are usually unfavorable. WPI hasn't got the sparkle that MIT boasts. WPI students don't make the national news for messing with the scoreboard at the Army-Navy game or stealing campus landmarks from Rensselaer Polytechnic or anything. Despite occasionally-grim-faced efforts by the administration to make WPI students have school spirit ("You're going to have a good time on this vacation if I have to break every bone in your body!"), there just isn't much of it about most of the time, and what there is tends to be charged with a certain amount of irony.
Truth to tell, WPI people feel a little resentful toward MIT for all the spiffy stuff it has. MIT has the Infinite Corridor (and, twice a year, the curious cosmological event called MIThenge), the dome, the steam tunnels. It's in Cambridge, a mere handful of stops up the Red Line from Harvard Square. It has a taco place in the Student Center. Hell, it has a Student Center. WPI didn't when I was there. About the only cool thing WPI has that MIT doesn't is the nuclear reactor, and you can't even get in and see that unless you're a nuke eng major.
The thing is, even when WPI is going wrong, which it does quite often? It goes wrong with character. WPI doesn't just have bad food service; it has food service that's literally one grade below what the same food service company serves at prisons. WPI doesn't just have a parking problem; it has a parking problem that the school's administration seriously considers addressing by tearing up a lovely, relaxing outdoor garden. WPI doesn't just go get a slick, costly new logo as part of a misguided attempt to make itself more trendy and appealing to the young people; it gets a new logo that happens to be the semaphore for SHIP SINKING, SEND HELP. WPI doesn't just decide it wants to shed its tech-school image and become A Great American University; it seriously considers changing its name to "WPI University", a name in which the "WPI" would no longer have stood for anything, like AT&T or KFC.
I'm quite serious - all of the above actually happened. Everything WPI does seems to start out well-intentioned, but arguably misguided, and end up with some terminal but oddly pleasing flaw. Here's another example. Some years after I left the school, someone decided that the block of West Street that bisects the heart of campus should be closed. Students had long found that getting from one side of campus to the other was a bit of an adventure with city traffic using it as a shortcut from Institute Road to Salisbury Street, blazing through at speeds upward of 30 miles an hour. And so the City of Worcester was petitioned and at length it agreed, and that block of West Street was closed to through traffic between those two roads.
To celebrate this occasion and generally throw some money around, the WPI administration decided to expand Freeman Plaza, the little park-like space alongside West Street near the biology building. And so they did, adding a second plaza called Reunion Plaza where West Street had been. Excitement grew as planners announced that Reunion Plaza would incorporate a fountain. Well, why not? WPI hadn't had a fountain before, and they're jolly good fun. Everyone loves fountains.
Except that the city stepped in and informed the school at that point that, since West Street was an emergency artery, it did still have to be kept passable, in the event that emergency vehicles might need to cut across there. So building a great decorative fountain smack in the middle simply won't do, don't you see.
Oh, said WPI. We hadn't realized that.
The result: There's a fountain there, all right. Flush with the ground, spattering water in all directions because it can't have a catch pool at the base of it, it spouts into the air like a geyser has suddenly erupted out of what had been a plain old decorative brick plaza.
So you see what I mean. WPI tries to be grand and wondrous and even ostentatious, but every time it does so, it ends up coming off a trifle naff. If you're associated with the school, you can either groan about it or learn to take perverse pleasure in it.
Unfortunately, what would have been the ultimate example of this curious phenomenon turned out to be a little too extreme and didn't get built. It's a shame, too, because it would have been magnificent.
When I was a student, the cause célèbre around the school was the student center. There wasn't one, and a lot of people on campus felt that was something the administration ought to look into changing, as long as they were charging more than a lot of schools that did have them. WPI has used the phrase "The Two Towers" (yes, yes, I know) to describe its campus atmosphere, because the two oldest buildings on campus have towers on them, and the call for a student center went for some time under the banner "Three Towers for WPI".
Well, after many years of wrangling - where would we put something like that, who's going to pay for it, isn't that uncomfortably furnished area with the vending machines good enough - the Institute's administration announced that they had found the solution. Shortly thereafter, the president's office proudly unveiled a plan for a student center.
An underground student center.
No, honestly. The plan, as gushingly reviewed by the Institute newspaper (which went by the sublimely reassuring name Newspeak in those days), was to hollow out a cavern under the Quad and put the student center in it. There would be staircases like the ones at subway stations providing access at the corners of the Quad. Here and there would be ground-level skylights providing some natural light. The resulting facility would be a combination Student Union and Bat Cave, presumably with the giant penny serving as the focal point for the snack bar seating area.
I rather liked the idea - I like bizarre, inadvisable things like that - but the plan was roundly panned by the student body as a whole. "Two Towers and a Bomb Shelter" was the nickname given to it in the following week's Newspeak editorial, which lacked the initial article's gosh-isn't-this-wonderful tone. The administration, as usual, responded to the criticism by getting all huffy and basically saying, "Well, if you don't really want a student center, why have you been bothering us about it all this time?"
Eventually a more conventional student center was built, at the expense of knocking down a rather pleasant but admittedly unuseful wooded area behind the physics building. I've been there, and it's a nice enough place, in that generic sort of way that all college buildings put up since about 1980 have about them. Still, I can't help but be sorry that the Student Bunker was never built. It would have been perfect, a concrete and lasting testament to 20th-century WPI's wonderfully wacky "what on Earth were they thinking?" mentality.
Ah, well. At least we still have the Fountain of Useless Knowledge.
I spent a year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. As so often happens with relationships these days, it didn't work out very well between us - WPI wanted too much money and I didn't have the maturity for a real commitment back then. Still, we had some good times.
WPI is kind of a peculiar school, which is probably a reflection of the fact that Worcester is kind of a peculiar town. A sign that was seen for many years on the side of a warehouse next to the Interstate downtown announced that, while every great American city has a college, Worcester has ten - which was quite true, and yet if there's a place in America that's less the typical college town, it's Worcester. A lot of people get down on Worcester for being grim and grubby and post-industrial, but I've always had a sort of contratian fondness for it.
The same also holds for WPI. It's quirky and in some ways really rather deficient - and more so when I was a student there - but it somehow managed to inspire a loyalty that's never really left me. In a strange way, a lot of the school's flaws and annoyances became perverse points of pride to me and a number of my schoolmates of the day.
Being a primarily technical school in the American Northeast, WPI draws a lot of comparisons to its much more famous cousin in Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Those comparisons are usually unfavorable. WPI hasn't got the sparkle that MIT boasts. WPI students don't make the national news for messing with the scoreboard at the Army-Navy game or stealing campus landmarks from Rensselaer Polytechnic or anything. Despite occasionally-grim-faced efforts by the administration to make WPI students have school spirit ("You're going to have a good time on this vacation if I have to break every bone in your body!"), there just isn't much of it about most of the time, and what there is tends to be charged with a certain amount of irony.
Truth to tell, WPI people feel a little resentful toward MIT for all the spiffy stuff it has. MIT has the Infinite Corridor (and, twice a year, the curious cosmological event called MIThenge), the dome, the steam tunnels. It's in Cambridge, a mere handful of stops up the Red Line from Harvard Square. It has a taco place in the Student Center. Hell, it has a Student Center. WPI didn't when I was there. About the only cool thing WPI has that MIT doesn't is the nuclear reactor, and you can't even get in and see that unless you're a nuke eng major.
The thing is, even when WPI is going wrong, which it does quite often? It goes wrong with character. WPI doesn't just have bad food service; it has food service that's literally one grade below what the same food service company serves at prisons. WPI doesn't just have a parking problem; it has a parking problem that the school's administration seriously considers addressing by tearing up a lovely, relaxing outdoor garden. WPI doesn't just go get a slick, costly new logo as part of a misguided attempt to make itself more trendy and appealing to the young people; it gets a new logo that happens to be the semaphore for SHIP SINKING, SEND HELP. WPI doesn't just decide it wants to shed its tech-school image and become A Great American University; it seriously considers changing its name to "WPI University", a name in which the "WPI" would no longer have stood for anything, like AT&T or KFC.
I'm quite serious - all of the above actually happened. Everything WPI does seems to start out well-intentioned, but arguably misguided, and end up with some terminal but oddly pleasing flaw. Here's another example. Some years after I left the school, someone decided that the block of West Street that bisects the heart of campus should be closed. Students had long found that getting from one side of campus to the other was a bit of an adventure with city traffic using it as a shortcut from Institute Road to Salisbury Street, blazing through at speeds upward of 30 miles an hour. And so the City of Worcester was petitioned and at length it agreed, and that block of West Street was closed to through traffic between those two roads.
To celebrate this occasion and generally throw some money around, the WPI administration decided to expand Freeman Plaza, the little park-like space alongside West Street near the biology building. And so they did, adding a second plaza called Reunion Plaza where West Street had been. Excitement grew as planners announced that Reunion Plaza would incorporate a fountain. Well, why not? WPI hadn't had a fountain before, and they're jolly good fun. Everyone loves fountains.
Except that the city stepped in and informed the school at that point that, since West Street was an emergency artery, it did still have to be kept passable, in the event that emergency vehicles might need to cut across there. So building a great decorative fountain smack in the middle simply won't do, don't you see.
Oh, said WPI. We hadn't realized that.
The result: There's a fountain there, all right. Flush with the ground, spattering water in all directions because it can't have a catch pool at the base of it, it spouts into the air like a geyser has suddenly erupted out of what had been a plain old decorative brick plaza.
So you see what I mean. WPI tries to be grand and wondrous and even ostentatious, but every time it does so, it ends up coming off a trifle naff. If you're associated with the school, you can either groan about it or learn to take perverse pleasure in it.
Unfortunately, what would have been the ultimate example of this curious phenomenon turned out to be a little too extreme and didn't get built. It's a shame, too, because it would have been magnificent.
When I was a student, the cause célèbre around the school was the student center. There wasn't one, and a lot of people on campus felt that was something the administration ought to look into changing, as long as they were charging more than a lot of schools that did have them. WPI has used the phrase "The Two Towers" (yes, yes, I know) to describe its campus atmosphere, because the two oldest buildings on campus have towers on them, and the call for a student center went for some time under the banner "Three Towers for WPI".
Well, after many years of wrangling - where would we put something like that, who's going to pay for it, isn't that uncomfortably furnished area with the vending machines good enough - the Institute's administration announced that they had found the solution. Shortly thereafter, the president's office proudly unveiled a plan for a student center.
An underground student center.
No, honestly. The plan, as gushingly reviewed by the Institute newspaper (which went by the sublimely reassuring name Newspeak in those days), was to hollow out a cavern under the Quad and put the student center in it. There would be staircases like the ones at subway stations providing access at the corners of the Quad. Here and there would be ground-level skylights providing some natural light. The resulting facility would be a combination Student Union and Bat Cave, presumably with the giant penny serving as the focal point for the snack bar seating area.
I rather liked the idea - I like bizarre, inadvisable things like that - but the plan was roundly panned by the student body as a whole. "Two Towers and a Bomb Shelter" was the nickname given to it in the following week's Newspeak editorial, which lacked the initial article's gosh-isn't-this-wonderful tone. The administration, as usual, responded to the criticism by getting all huffy and basically saying, "Well, if you don't really want a student center, why have you been bothering us about it all this time?"
Eventually a more conventional student center was built, at the expense of knocking down a rather pleasant but admittedly unuseful wooded area behind the physics building. I've been there, and it's a nice enough place, in that generic sort of way that all college buildings put up since about 1980 have about them. Still, I can't help but be sorry that the Student Bunker was never built. It would have been perfect, a concrete and lasting testament to 20th-century WPI's wonderfully wacky "what on Earth were they thinking?" mentality.
Ah, well. At least we still have the Fountain of Useless Knowledge.
