On the way back to the airport at the end of nearly every winter, Thanksgiving, spring and summer break, my mother has asked me in some form: "Do you even like Brown?"
I've never been the pep rally type, and my lack of outward enthusiasm no doubt leaves my parents paranoid that their son is secretly miserable and perhaps that their $150,000 investment was a mistake. By now I've learned to respond with an enthusiastic "Yes! I really do! I would recommend it to anyone!" and try to make it to the security check without having to touch the subject again.
The truth is, I never really thought about it. Sometimes I'm not sure I even went to school here.
I chose Brown because I didn't get into Harvard, and I wasn't quite ready to commit the next four years of my life to living, breathing and learning journalism at the Medill School at Northwestern.
So I came to Brown, and spent the next four years living, breathing and learning journalism at the Brown Daily Herald instead.
My very first story was a profile of the new Vice President for Administration, Walter Hunter, and I found myself covering the University's finances and bureaucracy years before the capital campaign and Master Plan made it trendy - or even the tiniest bit interesting to Herald readers.
I loved it anyway, in part because I had discovered something I was good at. But I also came to see Brown as a many-headed beast holed up in University Hall, endlessly debating whether to invest more aggressively or which program's funding should be cut in the latest round of belt-tightening. Classes, friends, my activities weren't Brown; they were the life and opportunities I created for myself out of thin air.
Needing a diversion from my nearly full-time job as a Herald reporter, I became a BOLT leader sophomore year despite never having camped overnight in my life. BOLT changed me in ways The Herald never could. I took journalism for granted, but didn't know I could be a leader until I tried it in the backcountry. The Herald gave me an ego; BOLT gave me genuine self-confidence.
But when people asked me if I loved Brown, I could still only say with absolute certainty that I loved the Brown Daily Herald, and I loved BOLT, and I loved my friends. But Brown? From my jaded student journalist perspective, I had learned how to write a good lead, tie a trucker's hitch and solidify lifelong friendships through my own strength of will, while Brown was the beast of University Hall, still something of a foreign entity.
Then I became executive editor of The Herald. I brought a cocky enthusiasm I prayed people would find infectious rather than annoying. My goals were to report the hell out of anything that came our way, and to make as many staffers as possible feel the passion I felt about journalism. Again, I felt set apart from the University, whose idea of career advice for prospective journalists was a Google search for internships and whose administrators often resented our inquiries into their activities.
As late as January 2004, I still responded to my mother's "Do you love Brown?" with feigned enthusiasm. But something about leaving The Herald shook me out of my ego-driven denial and made me see that so much of what I have enjoyed about the past four years directly or indirectly stemmed from the University. I made my own friends, but Brown had the foresight to admit them. I savored the fact that The Herald lacked the rigid hierarchy of other college newspapers, but that too was no doubt the product of Brown's unique culture. I often joked about how insubstantial my classes felt compared to my experience with The Herald, but I still learned an incredible amount about an astonishing breadth of topics, something Brown's New Curriculum made possible.
I have freed the beast from University Hall, and can honestly say, next time my mother asks, that I love it.
Brian Baskin '04 was a Herald executive editor.
