Brown University, Class of 2031 Tour

by philg

In which the father of a high school junior in the Boston suburbs visits Brown University. His posts from our group chat:

  • Brown tour. A few prospective students wearing masks. Not Asian.
  • A few students who are cosplaying as lesbian.
  • A few girls with Muslim hijabs.
  • It looks like the bridge of Star Trek.

He shared a photo of the acceptance rate by gender ID (not clear if this is discrimination unless we also know the SAT scores):

They’re shown the essay prompt that enables applicants to tell the admissions Mandarins their race:

Somehow they ended up in a chapel and there was a copy of African American Heritage Hymnal for each person.

  • Almost no males here. It’s all short lesbians.
  • Plus some East Asians and Indian
  • Trans
  • Student tour guide is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy according to Joe Biden.
  • didn’t show us inside dorms. Didn’t show us any dining areas. Didn’t show us any classrooms, labs, or facilities. Didn’t show any sports or workout areas.
  • Three of the students giving the tours said one of their deciding factors was that Brown gave them free tuition.

The tourists were subjected to a Land Acknowledgement from a greedy nonprofit that refuses to give the land back and pay rent:

My friend and his child decided not to take the Slavery and Legacy Walking Tour.

He had been wondering “What research are seniors doing related to menstruation?” Answered:

A poster from @brownriseup:

A still frame from one of his videos:

Happy End of College Admissions Month to those who celebrate!

25 thoughts on “Brown University, Class of 2031 Tour”

  2. > The tourists were subjected to a Land Acknowledgement from a greedy nonprofit that refuses to give the land back and pay rent

    LOL! Your next book remains due, Dr. Greenspun. I need to read the divorce one fully though.

    Reply

    • @PGF

      My vote would be for a book on educational reform. I liked Phil’s article on making college more like the business world on his website, haven’t been able to locate it again. Would be interesting to see it in book form, expanded and updated.

      Or, maybe a book on pride flags and weed dispensaries of the world. I haven’t read the divorce book (we don’t have anything of value to squabble over and no kids, maybe why we are still together), but I have read the Samantha one. From his site:

      > I found that you seem to have investigated roughly five times as many attractive women as geysers while you were in Yellowstone.

      And their point is?

      From Amazon:

      > He is the author of five books, mostly on horrifyingly dull technical subjects. Greenspun was born in 1963 and raised in Bethesda, Maryland. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Alex, his Samoyed.

      That needs updating a little. I’m thinking of relocating to Maryland, Phil, but I’m concerned it is too Republican controlled. Thoughts? [ducks Marry-Tax-Land reply]

    • NH: https://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth might be what you’re thinking about.

      Given the expense of a university education and the importance of having highly educated taxpayers to a heavily indebted U.S., it is not acceptable to say “Some of the people who pay our high tuition dollars will learn a lot; it depends on their study habits.”
      Students in 2009 should not be required to exercise super-human self-discipline in ignoring the siren songs of email, Web, IM, Xbox, telephone, etc. A college student should be able to show up to school at 9:00 am, break for lunch at 12:30, return at 1:30 pm, and go home at 7:00 pm, all work for the day completed.

      Students should work in an open-office environment, where they can get assistance from others sitting at adjacent desks and from roaming teachers.

      This system would require that curriculum flexibility be reduced or that the cherished semester system be scrapped. If all sophomores majoring in, say, Economics, were seated together, they would need to be taking the same courses. An alternative would be to teach one course at a time and group all of the students in that course together for the three or four weeks of an intensive class. After the course ended, the students might be reshuffled. This would interfere with the semester system. Instead of teaching a few hours per week for 13 weeks, a professor would have to work hard for three or four weeks and then would have a month off from teaching.

      [The author of this article has some experience with this idea. He founded a one-year post-baccalaureate program in Computer Science. The curriculum was copied from traditional schools such as MIT and Stanford, but each course lasted one month. The 37 students sat together in a cubicle farm and worked on homework and labs together. After ten months, they’d taken the ten core courses of an undergraduate CS degree and 100 percent of the students who started the program were able to perform competently as software developers, applicants to Computer Science graduate school, and in other careers typically chosen by people with bachelor’s degrees in CS.]

    • @philg

      That’s the one, thanks! They only copied half your idea (ADUni) to create the entire on-line learning industry — I suppose that was where the immediate payback was. Changing in-person academia (aside from Coronapanics) I suppose is like docking the Queen Mary in New York harbor without tug boats. The idea of going to college 9-5, and turning it off nights and weekends resonated as brilliant when I read it. That would give one more time for girlfriends and a life in general. (I had no luck finding it with search engines. It should have been a top result.) So much of college is cargo-culting and politics.

      Someone in the original comments argued that an open office would be distracting for reading. I worked R&D jobs where there was a lot of technical reading, in a noisy environment. I worked around it by putting an out-of-office sign on my desk, and going somewhere quiet to read. I think even motivated high-school students would benefit from such an environment. At Boeing we had “brown-bag lectures”, knowledgeable employees would occasionally give lectures during lunch, preserving some of the academic tradition.

      This was another interesting section:

      > History of the University starting in 1088

      The teaching technologies you listed post 1088 have evolved even more. AI’s role is up in the air. Instructors being more hands-on might help alleviate the negative effects.

    • Continued…

      As a matter of fact what you outlined in your article was very much like the R&D jobs I had, including at Boeing. I learned much more than I ever did in lecture-based courses. Obviously, finding fully prepared students that are responsible and independent coming out of these modern K12 schools, man I don’t know. Damn, even ones who can read something longer than a Twitter post. “To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.”

    • Sorry OAG, didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. I cut and pasted the wrong username. I should lay down the bong and go to bed.

    • @NH

      I thought I did write that. No worries, mate/matron/matrix. I should have gone straight to the front 9 this morning to clear my head, then to the 19th hole. I had a fresh PTSD dream this morning about Rhode Island, a bunch of rabid parents who supported the anti-Kirk teacher.

      Go ahead and write ALL my comments, who cares? I don’t think anyone is listening anyway. Maybe Greenspun ought to write a book about how we need to become indifferent to the web again, like returning to horse and carriage. Throw a frisbee to the dog while you watch your hot neighbor sunbathe. You hippies referred to it as “Back to the garden.”

      > Travels with Samantha was born of the world’s indifference to the World Wide Web

      [Checking my own fake name for typos…and post.]

  3. My tour of Columbia in 1985 with my mom included:

    * Lesbians making out on a bench
    * Crack vials in the alleys
    * Countless homeless people and beggars on the campus periphery
    * Mountains of garbage bags due to an interruption of collection
    * Half the women not wearing bras
    * An overnight stay in a dorm made of cinder blocks, reeking of weed and stale beer (at least not urine like the subway entrances)

    Who could say “no” to that? Brown is in Rhode Island, so eww, I wouldn’t even step foot into there. My mom said “Are you sure you know what you are getting in to? Your dad wants a new Porsche this year.”

    Reply

    • I will concede that in the 1980s, it seemed like Rhode Island had the cutest girls. I think it was because their hair and clothes were more preppy conservative, an attractive look for us conservative boys.

      They didn’t have that Aquanet poodle look and Pat Benatar clothes. But as soon as they started talking, all bets were off, that accent (“Oh, Peeta!”) I don’t know what was wrong with the guys, but the girls never seemed to have dates and got mad at me when I had to turn them down. Sour grapes.

  5. I skipped the “college tour.” One summer day after high school graduation, after I got of my overnight shift pumping gas, I simply rode my bike to the local community college, registered for classes, and paid my $400 tuition after Pell grants. This was 1980,

    Reply

  6. I have read that some universities give preferential treatment to males, because their female students don’t like it when there are too few guys.

    The Brown ratio seems high however. If we disregard issues such as lesbianism and lack of will to date across races, we can compute the following harem ratio which I found in a magazine article sometime in the 10s.

    With the above numbers, there are two women per man. However, as the article noted, half the men are hopeless anyway so dating will concentrate on the top half. This means the harem ratio is a full 4: every man in the chosen population will enjoy four girlfriends. The lower half, on the other hand, will have none.

    In a more normal situation, the harem ratio is 3 or even 2.

    Reply

    • Can’t speak about dating, but my opinion is that the culture of the city permeates the university. There’s only so much insularity a university can afford.

    • The most beautiful college women in the US are at the University of Florida!

    • DP: A friend’s child started at UF in January. A couple of months later I asked about his social life there. He said that he was busy with classes and with a side startup. I then said “UF has 60,000 students, all young and the majority female. Do you think that there is some future point in your life where you’ll have an easier time meeting attractive young women?”

    • Not speaking about him, but some stupid people choose to express via tears, LOL!

    • > side startup

      In my day, a side startup was dating a new girl to replace the current girlfriend. Kids these days aren’t starting so young — I don’t know if that is such a bad thing. I started dating at 11 in the 70s, going to the movies, etc. That is really too young to become deeply emotionally attached. My first breakup made me swear off girls for a year. On the other hand, we see HPV vaccine makers on TV advertise that 9 is when the fun starts — when mom and dad become embarrassments. Yikes that is gross.

      Phil is on the right track here though, high school and college is the best time to find cuties that haven’t collected a lot of baggage. Also, take a real good look at her mom if you get serious. Don’t date crazy. But everybody knows the cutest girls are at Rutgers, Jersey queens, for real. Solid safety-school women, not too smart, not to dumb, Jersey tough in case they have to support you:

      https://scarletknights.com/sports/womens-volleyball

    • > My first breakup made me swear off girls for a year.

      That’s such a natural reaction that there’s a story that Pope Francis decided to join the Church after a break-up. A similar event is a part of old-style weddings in India.

      Some noteworthy but potentially controversial observations here too [35-65]:

      https://www.jamesmitchell.info/favorite-sayings/

    • Thanks. I don’t remember saying any of those things that I’m quoted as saying by James Mitchell! I guess that’s a sign that I talk too much.

    • > https://www.jamesmitchell.info/favorite-sayings/

      Interesting link thanks PGF. 55 is kind of contradictory to the rest of the advice about crazies:

      > If the most beautiful girl in the world is willing to go out with me, why would I say no?

      Because she is totally cray-cray? I had one of those crushing on me, gorgeous but psychotic. (I’m not bragging — it was very confusing — they usually avoided me like the plague.) It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t then. When I turned her down, she raged on a campaign of hate. It probably would have been worse if I would have gotten involved. Men are supposed to take rejection with aplomb, women are so used to doing the rejection they haven’t built up the tolerance for “no”.

      Hmm…

      > 77. I’ve yet to be on a campus where most women weren’t worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I’ve yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing. — Gloria Steinem

      I think we were worrying about it, Gloria, maybe just different aspects.

  7. > detention centers where people are caged, abused, and denied adequate medical care.

    I thought they were talking about my middle school in Rhode Island for a minute there. Sometimes teach would let you go to the restroom, sometimes not. (The male teachers were fond of wearing lime green pants with bright pink shirts.) I could have used financial services when a bully (held back three grades) took my lunch money off me after I finally did make it to the restroom for a smoke. The key to keeping the bullies at bay was lifting weights in the yard. Girlie mags were currency.

    Reply
Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *