IF YOU GIVE IT, THEY WILL BUILD
sky blue and black.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a
university in want of a healthy endowment must be in possession of generous
donors. A truth equally universal but rarely acknowledged is that a university,
wanting a healthy endowment and so not wanting to dissuade future donors, will
accept just about any pointless, useless, god-awful gift it receives, whether or
not it wants or needs or even gives a damn about it. Universities accept
donations like eight-year-olds accept birthday gifts: eagerly, indiscriminately,
always celebrating their favorites but still happily squirreling away every last
bit of the loot that comes along; they may not like the socks and pajamas, the
card games and marbles, nearly as much as they like the video games and the Lego
sets and the Star Wars action figures, but they would never dream of declining
them. Acceptance is key. Accumulation is king. And there's always the hope
that the gifts, even the ones from your crazy old aunt who thinks you're three
or four years younger than you actually are, will be better next
time.
For eight-year-olds and their parents, this policy leads to cluttered bedrooms and playrooms, to overflowing closets and toy chests, to basements and garages that look like the loading docks at an overstocked Toys R Us warehouse. For universities and their inhabitants, this policy leads to squandered assets and resources, to frivolous knick-knacks and bric-a-bracs, to buildings and campuses that feel like houses with plasma tvs in the living rooms but half-empty cupboards in the kitchen. You have some cool stuff to show off to your guests, but you often go to bed unsatisfied.
In the late 80s, plenty of students went to bed unsatisfied -- in part because they were sleeping on old, lumpy mattresses in old, dingy dorm rooms -- at my alma mater, Duquesne University, where the education was always world-class but the amenities and facilities often were not. The residence halls needed new furniture and major renovations. The classroom buildings needed new furniture and better technology. The academic departments needed more equipment and better funding. The library -- to do serious research, we had to drive to Pitt or CMU -- needed more resources and a lot more books. So when a generous benefactor came along in the early 90s and wanted to make a significant donation to the university, what did Duquesne get? Some beds? Some books? Some budget relief? Nope. It got something much better and sexier. Something it never knew it wanted but was only too happy to accept: a brand new omnistone walkway straight through the heart of the campus. Which felt a lot like a dagger to the heart, or at least to the puzzling heads and aching backs, of its students.
Sure, the old walkway was made of simple, graying macadam. And yeah, it had some cracks and fissures and could have used a fresh seal coat from one end to the other. But it wasn't exactly the Burma Road either. I don't ever remember seeing anyone trip or fall or break an ankle on the way to class. I don't remember reading an article in the Duquesne Duke about some poor freshman disappearing into a crater outside Canevin Hall. And I certainly don't remember anyone in the cafeteria or the computer lab or the student union saying, You know what we really need around here? A new interlocking paving system on Centennial Walk. That sure would improve the quality of our academic experience! But we got it just the same.
Now all's well, I suppose, that ends well. Fifteen years later, Duquesne has the beds and the books, the funds and the furniture, the repairs and the renovations. The university is building and booming, the students are better equipped than they've ever been, and the omnistone on (the newly christened) Academic Walk -- which has, I admit, always looked great -- is holding up nicely. But in 1991 it was difficult to imagine, and even more difficult to predict, that those changes would come with an administration that, offered a donation it liked for a gift it did not need, could not find the simple, certain principles to say, Your offer is very generous, and we are very grateful for it. But we have many more pressing needs at Duquesne, ones that directly affect the quality of student life and work on our campus, and we hope you will allow us to use your gift to make a more lasting and meaningful impact on our educational mission and our educational success.
It is not, after all, considered rude -- so long as you are polite and appreciative in the process -- to return a gift that you do not need. Especially when you can exchange it for something that you do. But it is, I think, quite silly to accept a gift you do not want. Especially when you try it on and see that it does not fit.
Which brings us, then, across town to the Carnegie Mellon campus, where eight-year-old university administrators have been busy unwrapping, and then trying to figure out what the hell to do with, the biggest, silliest pair of socks you've ever seen: a 100-foot-tall sculpture entitled "Walking to the Sky," created by CMU alumnus Jonathan Borofsky and donated by CMU alumnus/trustee/crazy aunt Jill Gansman Kraus. The original, now permanently installed at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, was first exhibited at Rockefeller Center in New York City in the fall of 2004. Though I don't know how, as some people claimed, its installation helped to heal the wounds of 9/11, I do know that, rising into the Manhattan skyline, the odd beauty and poetry of the piece made incongruous, idiosyncratic sense. And it looked cool too.
But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Poetry often falls on deaf ears. And the coolness of public art installations, like that of rhetoric and of gift-giving, is defiantly contextual, situational, subjective. Just as one man's trash is another man's treasure, just as one woman's gorgeous gift is another woman's god-awful garage-sale fodder, what makes incongruous, idiosyncratic sense on a city street in Manhattan can seem like so much unbalanced, unbecoming insanity on a college campus in Pittsburgh.
Note to alumni: You can start breathing again. This is just a Photoshopped image.
But it almost became the real thing, when a cabal of a committee charged with Campus Design, Facility Development, and Gratuitous Gift Placement decided that this spot, at the intersection of the Cut and the Hornbostel Mall, at the open, beating heart of the campus' two great green spaces, amidst a low-slung series of yellow-bricked buildings, would be the perfect place to erect that monstrous steel sculpture. A concrete foundation was poured. Installation plans were made. The date drew closer. But then slowly, inevitably, word spread. Resistance took root. And Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' Five Stages of Death and Undue Donations soon followed.
Denial turned to Anger. A couple of professors wrote thoughtful, critical responses. The student newspaper decried the sculpture as ugly and cumbersome and a huge phallus. Then Anger turned to Bargaining. The Student Senate met. The Faculty Senate resolved. A Public Art committee formed and deliberated. The President wrote an unctuous, condescending message about the placing of art in public spaces and its central role in expressing and commenting on the human condition and community identity. The most telling sentence of the email -- which did not address the condition, human or otherwise, of a community uneager for its identity or its landscape to be skewered by a hundred-foot folly -- read: When a generous donor offered to provide for the purchase of a version of this piece, I was excited about the possibility of bringing it to our campus. Which is to say, he was excited about the possibility of accepting the gift. It is not unreasonable to imagine him expressing the same excitement about the gift of a sculpture called "Crawling to the Sea" or "Shitting on the Ground." Either would no doubt also be a phenomenally striking work. Even more importantly, both would also be free.
Bargaining turns now to Depression. After last week's Public Art Committee Open Forum -- at which, were it anything like most university public forums, a collection of closed minds declared itself open, then armed the gates of its own opinion, lest some new or nasty thought cross its threshold -- and this week's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, the installation is apparently a done deal. Bowing some small bit to public pressure, the committee has decreed that the sculpture will now rise from the ground near Warner Hall, a site much less offensive but no less obtrusive. Of course, it is difficult for a piece of art to be unobtrusive when it rises several stories above the campus' tallest building and half again higher than the campus' tallest flagpole; placing that piece anywhere on campus will be like -- and is only marginally less absurd than -- standing Yao Ming in a room full of pygmies.
By May 21st, the date the donation stipulates installation must be completed -- you gotta love a gift that comes with a timetable and an expiration date; it's like a gift certificate from Big & Tall Sculptures -- Depression will pass into Acceptance, and "Walking to the Sky" will, like a great, gaudy toothbrush shoved too far and too fast into the gaping mouth of a gagging campus, be hard to ignore and even harder to swallow. Its creator describes the sculpture as a symbol of our collective search for wisdom and the awakened consciousness that comes with this freedom. And I suppose that sounds pretty nice. But it would sound even better, or at least more accurate, to say that it is about to become a symbol of a college's search for money and the abject obsequiousness that comes with that dependence.
With most gifts like this, the absurdity of the obsequiousness and the futility of the dependence do little harm. The Borofsky sculpture, wherever they put it on campus, will be obtrusive and elephantine and comically discordant -- like a flagpole stuck in a sandbox, or an Ikea lamp thrust inside a colonial-style dollhouse -- and it will not contribute anything critical or essential to the university's social or academic or even artistic development. But at least it will neither impede nor prohibit the physical and structural and intellectual progress of the campus. The same, alas, can not be said of the last gift Carnegie Mellon accepted from its crazy Aunt Jill: the Kraus Campo, a garden/installation and undulating eyesore that sits aloof between the cautious utility of the Tepper School of Business and the considerable majesty of the College of Fine Arts.
Official university literature describes the site as a project that challenges the very definition of a garden: it is both garden-as-sculpture and sculpture-as-garden. For readers who did not go to graduate school in English or the Arts, here's a rough paraphrase of that passage: it captures the very definition of affectation: it is gift-as-pretension and explanation-as-bullshit. The designer and creater of the campo, artist Mel Bochner -- who wins this week's TWM Award for Most Unfortunate Use of One in One's Own Writing of One's Own Text -- explains that the meandering paths, rising and falling as they curve between the undulating mounds, heighten one's awareness of one's constantly changing orientation to the site, all while giving the surreal sensation of stepping into orangeness. Once more, in translation: the garden is not level, and the orange walkways curve. If we're stepping into anything, it's most certainly pretentiousness. The Landscape Architect, Michael Van Valkenburgh, notes that he wanted the design to fill a void on campus: Most great universities have honorific spaces such as quadrangle lawns, and most have gardens. Carnegie Mellon has a big main lawn space but no garden. This news will come as a considerable shock to anyone who stands in the Kraus Campo and faces southwest, where the university's Peace Garden -- a bit overgrown at times, but warm and intimate with wooden benches and large, overhanging trees -- sits less than ten paces from the end of the orange-paint road. Perhaps Mr. Van Valkenburgh was so intent upon his work and his site that he never found the time to turn around. Or to open his eyes. Or to notice that Carnegie Mellon has two big main lawn spaces (at the intersection of which some fiberglass figurines almost went skywalking).
But all this silliness and self-indulgence aside, even at a university in the midst of a budget crunch, on a campus in desperate need of a main dining hall and more student living space and more student meeting space and a whole hell of a lot more classroom space, an avant-garde second garden is not a bad thing. It's not necessary, and it's not particularly desirable, but neither is it terrible. Unless, of course, one especially silly element of the garden and the draconian terms of its gift prohibit the university from addressing one of those real, pressing needs.
Another of the Kraus Campo's distinguishing characteristics is its blaze-blue rear wall, which features a 6-foot high, 58-foot-long quotation, imprinted in reverse on a bed of gray tiles, from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The quotation, according to Bochner, critiques the very idea of those "elevated sentiments" engraved on institutional facades around the world. And that when deciphered, reveals itself as a metaphor for the garden as labyrinth.
Never mind that the Carnegie Mellon campus proudly features quite a few of those elevated sentiments. Never mind that the backward printing of a syntactically challenged quotation hardly qualifies as a critique. (Too one is this then, so if.) And never mind that the linear progression of a sentence, whether backward or forward, makes a pretty crappy metaphor for a labyrinth. Let's consider instead how this wall and this quotation -- of, if you prefer, how this critique and this metaphor -- prohibit the Tepper School from building two more badly needed classrooms.
Behind those blue bricks and backward words are two lecture halls: Cooper & Simon Auditoriums, both freshly renovated and updated in the summer of 2004, around the same time the Kraus Campo/Garden/Installation/Labyrinth/Laughingstock was built. During those renovations, contractors laid the literal and metaphorical foundation for two more classrooms to be built above them, integrated into a new wing of the second floor and providing space for about fifteen more classes per week, at about seventy-five students per class. That construction, slated for the summer of 2005, never began. And is still on hold. Because the university powers-that-be -- who had a copy of the Tepper School master plan, had approved the construction, and would benefit greatly from the flexibility those two new classrooms, funded internally and entirely by Tepper School funds, would provide for campus-wide course scheduling -- agreed to a stipulation in Aunt Jill's gift that the Great Wall of the Blue Backward Metaphor not be altered in any way for any reason. Not even, apparently, for the expansion of critical academic infrastructure on the campus of an academic institution.
The Tepper folks, who were understandably apoplectic at the acceptance of that stipulation and the reversal of their building approval, pledged to do (and pay) whatever it took to preserve the wall and placate the donor: paint the second floor blue, move the quotation higher on the wall, keep the quotation where it is now, add a second, equally pointless and pretentious backward quotation above the first. (Okay. Not that last part. But all the rest.) Their pleas and pledges, offers and overtures, were rebuffed at every turn and try. Only in the last few weeks were they even allowed to contact or to discuss the matter with Ms. Gansman Kraus Campo Sculpture Giver. Why? Because, well, blah blah blah and blah-dee blah-dee blah. Translation: you don't fuck with the donors.
After all, if you do fuck with the donors, they might not come around again next year and you give you a truly vital and vibrant gift. You know, like a papule-covered, 100-foot erection of a sculpture that insolently fucks with the campus. And the community. And the very nature of what it means to be a private university with all-too-public spaces and all-too-pressing needs. Because that, in the end, is the high cost of doing business in modern higher education. You want what you want, and you need what you need, but you always take what you can get. In any omnistoned way, labyrinthine shape, or phallic form you can get it.
For eight-year-olds and their parents, this policy leads to cluttered bedrooms and playrooms, to overflowing closets and toy chests, to basements and garages that look like the loading docks at an overstocked Toys R Us warehouse. For universities and their inhabitants, this policy leads to squandered assets and resources, to frivolous knick-knacks and bric-a-bracs, to buildings and campuses that feel like houses with plasma tvs in the living rooms but half-empty cupboards in the kitchen. You have some cool stuff to show off to your guests, but you often go to bed unsatisfied.
In the late 80s, plenty of students went to bed unsatisfied -- in part because they were sleeping on old, lumpy mattresses in old, dingy dorm rooms -- at my alma mater, Duquesne University, where the education was always world-class but the amenities and facilities often were not. The residence halls needed new furniture and major renovations. The classroom buildings needed new furniture and better technology. The academic departments needed more equipment and better funding. The library -- to do serious research, we had to drive to Pitt or CMU -- needed more resources and a lot more books. So when a generous benefactor came along in the early 90s and wanted to make a significant donation to the university, what did Duquesne get? Some beds? Some books? Some budget relief? Nope. It got something much better and sexier. Something it never knew it wanted but was only too happy to accept: a brand new omnistone walkway straight through the heart of the campus. Which felt a lot like a dagger to the heart, or at least to the puzzling heads and aching backs, of its students.
Sure, the old walkway was made of simple, graying macadam. And yeah, it had some cracks and fissures and could have used a fresh seal coat from one end to the other. But it wasn't exactly the Burma Road either. I don't ever remember seeing anyone trip or fall or break an ankle on the way to class. I don't remember reading an article in the Duquesne Duke about some poor freshman disappearing into a crater outside Canevin Hall. And I certainly don't remember anyone in the cafeteria or the computer lab or the student union saying, You know what we really need around here? A new interlocking paving system on Centennial Walk. That sure would improve the quality of our academic experience! But we got it just the same.
Now all's well, I suppose, that ends well. Fifteen years later, Duquesne has the beds and the books, the funds and the furniture, the repairs and the renovations. The university is building and booming, the students are better equipped than they've ever been, and the omnistone on (the newly christened) Academic Walk -- which has, I admit, always looked great -- is holding up nicely. But in 1991 it was difficult to imagine, and even more difficult to predict, that those changes would come with an administration that, offered a donation it liked for a gift it did not need, could not find the simple, certain principles to say, Your offer is very generous, and we are very grateful for it. But we have many more pressing needs at Duquesne, ones that directly affect the quality of student life and work on our campus, and we hope you will allow us to use your gift to make a more lasting and meaningful impact on our educational mission and our educational success.
It is not, after all, considered rude -- so long as you are polite and appreciative in the process -- to return a gift that you do not need. Especially when you can exchange it for something that you do. But it is, I think, quite silly to accept a gift you do not want. Especially when you try it on and see that it does not fit.
Which brings us, then, across town to the Carnegie Mellon campus, where eight-year-old university administrators have been busy unwrapping, and then trying to figure out what the hell to do with, the biggest, silliest pair of socks you've ever seen: a 100-foot-tall sculpture entitled "Walking to the Sky," created by CMU alumnus Jonathan Borofsky and donated by CMU alumnus/trustee/crazy aunt Jill Gansman Kraus. The original, now permanently installed at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, was first exhibited at Rockefeller Center in New York City in the fall of 2004. Though I don't know how, as some people claimed, its installation helped to heal the wounds of 9/11, I do know that, rising into the Manhattan skyline, the odd beauty and poetry of the piece made incongruous, idiosyncratic sense. And it looked cool too.
But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Poetry often falls on deaf ears. And the coolness of public art installations, like that of rhetoric and of gift-giving, is defiantly contextual, situational, subjective. Just as one man's trash is another man's treasure, just as one woman's gorgeous gift is another woman's god-awful garage-sale fodder, what makes incongruous, idiosyncratic sense on a city street in Manhattan can seem like so much unbalanced, unbecoming insanity on a college campus in Pittsburgh.
Note to alumni: You can start breathing again. This is just a Photoshopped image.
But it almost became the real thing, when a cabal of a committee charged with Campus Design, Facility Development, and Gratuitous Gift Placement decided that this spot, at the intersection of the Cut and the Hornbostel Mall, at the open, beating heart of the campus' two great green spaces, amidst a low-slung series of yellow-bricked buildings, would be the perfect place to erect that monstrous steel sculpture. A concrete foundation was poured. Installation plans were made. The date drew closer. But then slowly, inevitably, word spread. Resistance took root. And Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' Five Stages of Death and Undue Donations soon followed.
Denial turned to Anger. A couple of professors wrote thoughtful, critical responses. The student newspaper decried the sculpture as ugly and cumbersome and a huge phallus. Then Anger turned to Bargaining. The Student Senate met. The Faculty Senate resolved. A Public Art committee formed and deliberated. The President wrote an unctuous, condescending message about the placing of art in public spaces and its central role in expressing and commenting on the human condition and community identity. The most telling sentence of the email -- which did not address the condition, human or otherwise, of a community uneager for its identity or its landscape to be skewered by a hundred-foot folly -- read: When a generous donor offered to provide for the purchase of a version of this piece, I was excited about the possibility of bringing it to our campus. Which is to say, he was excited about the possibility of accepting the gift. It is not unreasonable to imagine him expressing the same excitement about the gift of a sculpture called "Crawling to the Sea" or "Shitting on the Ground." Either would no doubt also be a phenomenally striking work. Even more importantly, both would also be free.
Bargaining turns now to Depression. After last week's Public Art Committee Open Forum -- at which, were it anything like most university public forums, a collection of closed minds declared itself open, then armed the gates of its own opinion, lest some new or nasty thought cross its threshold -- and this week's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, the installation is apparently a done deal. Bowing some small bit to public pressure, the committee has decreed that the sculpture will now rise from the ground near Warner Hall, a site much less offensive but no less obtrusive. Of course, it is difficult for a piece of art to be unobtrusive when it rises several stories above the campus' tallest building and half again higher than the campus' tallest flagpole; placing that piece anywhere on campus will be like -- and is only marginally less absurd than -- standing Yao Ming in a room full of pygmies.
By May 21st, the date the donation stipulates installation must be completed -- you gotta love a gift that comes with a timetable and an expiration date; it's like a gift certificate from Big & Tall Sculptures -- Depression will pass into Acceptance, and "Walking to the Sky" will, like a great, gaudy toothbrush shoved too far and too fast into the gaping mouth of a gagging campus, be hard to ignore and even harder to swallow. Its creator describes the sculpture as a symbol of our collective search for wisdom and the awakened consciousness that comes with this freedom. And I suppose that sounds pretty nice. But it would sound even better, or at least more accurate, to say that it is about to become a symbol of a college's search for money and the abject obsequiousness that comes with that dependence.
With most gifts like this, the absurdity of the obsequiousness and the futility of the dependence do little harm. The Borofsky sculpture, wherever they put it on campus, will be obtrusive and elephantine and comically discordant -- like a flagpole stuck in a sandbox, or an Ikea lamp thrust inside a colonial-style dollhouse -- and it will not contribute anything critical or essential to the university's social or academic or even artistic development. But at least it will neither impede nor prohibit the physical and structural and intellectual progress of the campus. The same, alas, can not be said of the last gift Carnegie Mellon accepted from its crazy Aunt Jill: the Kraus Campo, a garden/installation and undulating eyesore that sits aloof between the cautious utility of the Tepper School of Business and the considerable majesty of the College of Fine Arts.
Official university literature describes the site as a project that challenges the very definition of a garden: it is both garden-as-sculpture and sculpture-as-garden. For readers who did not go to graduate school in English or the Arts, here's a rough paraphrase of that passage: it captures the very definition of affectation: it is gift-as-pretension and explanation-as-bullshit. The designer and creater of the campo, artist Mel Bochner -- who wins this week's TWM Award for Most Unfortunate Use of One in One's Own Writing of One's Own Text -- explains that the meandering paths, rising and falling as they curve between the undulating mounds, heighten one's awareness of one's constantly changing orientation to the site, all while giving the surreal sensation of stepping into orangeness. Once more, in translation: the garden is not level, and the orange walkways curve. If we're stepping into anything, it's most certainly pretentiousness. The Landscape Architect, Michael Van Valkenburgh, notes that he wanted the design to fill a void on campus: Most great universities have honorific spaces such as quadrangle lawns, and most have gardens. Carnegie Mellon has a big main lawn space but no garden. This news will come as a considerable shock to anyone who stands in the Kraus Campo and faces southwest, where the university's Peace Garden -- a bit overgrown at times, but warm and intimate with wooden benches and large, overhanging trees -- sits less than ten paces from the end of the orange-paint road. Perhaps Mr. Van Valkenburgh was so intent upon his work and his site that he never found the time to turn around. Or to open his eyes. Or to notice that Carnegie Mellon has two big main lawn spaces (at the intersection of which some fiberglass figurines almost went skywalking).
But all this silliness and self-indulgence aside, even at a university in the midst of a budget crunch, on a campus in desperate need of a main dining hall and more student living space and more student meeting space and a whole hell of a lot more classroom space, an avant-garde second garden is not a bad thing. It's not necessary, and it's not particularly desirable, but neither is it terrible. Unless, of course, one especially silly element of the garden and the draconian terms of its gift prohibit the university from addressing one of those real, pressing needs.
Another of the Kraus Campo's distinguishing characteristics is its blaze-blue rear wall, which features a 6-foot high, 58-foot-long quotation, imprinted in reverse on a bed of gray tiles, from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The quotation, according to Bochner, critiques the very idea of those "elevated sentiments" engraved on institutional facades around the world. And that when deciphered, reveals itself as a metaphor for the garden as labyrinth.
Never mind that the Carnegie Mellon campus proudly features quite a few of those elevated sentiments. Never mind that the backward printing of a syntactically challenged quotation hardly qualifies as a critique. (Too one is this then, so if.) And never mind that the linear progression of a sentence, whether backward or forward, makes a pretty crappy metaphor for a labyrinth. Let's consider instead how this wall and this quotation -- of, if you prefer, how this critique and this metaphor -- prohibit the Tepper School from building two more badly needed classrooms.
Behind those blue bricks and backward words are two lecture halls: Cooper & Simon Auditoriums, both freshly renovated and updated in the summer of 2004, around the same time the Kraus Campo/Garden/Installation/Labyrinth/Laughingstock was built. During those renovations, contractors laid the literal and metaphorical foundation for two more classrooms to be built above them, integrated into a new wing of the second floor and providing space for about fifteen more classes per week, at about seventy-five students per class. That construction, slated for the summer of 2005, never began. And is still on hold. Because the university powers-that-be -- who had a copy of the Tepper School master plan, had approved the construction, and would benefit greatly from the flexibility those two new classrooms, funded internally and entirely by Tepper School funds, would provide for campus-wide course scheduling -- agreed to a stipulation in Aunt Jill's gift that the Great Wall of the Blue Backward Metaphor not be altered in any way for any reason. Not even, apparently, for the expansion of critical academic infrastructure on the campus of an academic institution.
The Tepper folks, who were understandably apoplectic at the acceptance of that stipulation and the reversal of their building approval, pledged to do (and pay) whatever it took to preserve the wall and placate the donor: paint the second floor blue, move the quotation higher on the wall, keep the quotation where it is now, add a second, equally pointless and pretentious backward quotation above the first. (Okay. Not that last part. But all the rest.) Their pleas and pledges, offers and overtures, were rebuffed at every turn and try. Only in the last few weeks were they even allowed to contact or to discuss the matter with Ms. Gansman Kraus Campo Sculpture Giver. Why? Because, well, blah blah blah and blah-dee blah-dee blah. Translation: you don't fuck with the donors.
After all, if you do fuck with the donors, they might not come around again next year and you give you a truly vital and vibrant gift. You know, like a papule-covered, 100-foot erection of a sculpture that insolently fucks with the campus. And the community. And the very nature of what it means to be a private university with all-too-public spaces and all-too-pressing needs. Because that, in the end, is the high cost of doing business in modern higher education. You want what you want, and you need what you need, but you always take what you can get. In any omnistoned way, labyrinthine shape, or phallic form you can get it.
Posted: Thu - March 16, 2006 at 04:15 PM
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Published On: Jun 30, 2009 08:40 AM
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