As a longtime resident of the great state of Kansas, there are typically two questions asked of me whenever I visit another part of the country. The first and more obvious of the two is an inquiry as to whether I live on a farm, grow wheat or own livestock. (For the record, I don't).
The second question I am asked about Kansas, however, really gets my goat. The phrasing varies, but it inevitably ends up as a question about Dorothy, Auntie Em, Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man or the Yellow Brick Road. It's always abundantly clear to me that I am indeed not in Kansas anymore, as no self-respecting resident of the state would ever ask me such a stupid question.
Imagine my considerable surprise and consternation, then, when I discovered that our beloved university has turned into a poorly translated adaptation of "The Wizard of Oz." Having flown through the air - although I was transported via airplane rather than tornado - I was deposited this September squarely in the center of campus amidst a sea of new faces attached to short frames. If the Freshman Orientation Lollipop Guild wasn't enough, there's also the perilous overabundance of a dangerous, aromatic plant (and I'm not talking about poppies). I have even found the Emerald City to College Hill's Oz. Any time one of my friends needs something, be it a heart, a brain, courage, party supplies, a stereo receiver or a chicken fried steak, they traipse on over to Seekonk (logically making I-195 the parallel to the Yellow Brick Road). Granted, Seekonk doesn't have much in common with the Emerald City. As little more than a glorified strip mall, it doesn't quite measure up to the promise of making your wildest dreams come true, and the closest I-195 ever comes to matching the hue of the Yellow Brick Road is when some random drunk with lowered inhibitions answers nature's call onto a concrete collision barrier.
No Oz is complete, however, without a villain. To find our story's Wicked Witch of the West, one need look no further than a story in The Herald last week ("Bergeron's reshuffling fuels more departures, and questions arise," Oct. 19). When Ira Magaziner's '69 P'06 P'07 P'10 proverbial house landed on top of the Wicked Witch of Core Requirements way back when in 1969, he and his fellow founders of the New Curriculum freed legions of incoming classes of Munchkins from the oppression of the stricter, more rigid curricula of the other universities in the Ivy League. Although her office will deny it to the ends of the earth, there is little doubt that Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron's ultimate goal is the reinstatement of the regime ended upon the undue flattening of her pre-1969 curricular counterpart.
Her tenure in the Office of the Dean of the College has demonstrated remarkable similarities to the rule of the Wicked Witch of the West over Oz. One of Bergeron's earliest actions here at Brown was to call in her flying monkeys from other universities like Stanford and Princeton to advise her as to how to dismantle what decades' worth of students and administrators had sought to build and support. On their advice, she began to restructure the administration into a more hierarchical form, ultimately going against the free-form spirit of the New Curriculum. Worst of all, in what some see as an effort to quell resistance to her changes, she's sacked several prominent members of the administration, at least two of whom had served the Brown community longer than current students have been alive. She'll get you, my pretties, and your little dogs too.
While this has been happening, President Ruth Simmons has done nothing to protect the New Curriculum. While we need a scary, enormous head to speak out in defense of the New Curriculum and on behalf of the student body, on this particular issue Simmons has merely been the quiet and unassuming man behind the curtain. It's true that she's got a lot on her plate already with the Boldly Brown campaign, but such an apparent threat to the spirit of the University merits turning on the theatrics.
Ultimately, the Wizard of Oz analogy doesn't take us very far. Although I haven't met her personally, people I know who have interacted with Bergeron have nice things to say. She is neither wicked nor a witch, although she did come to Brown from out west. In the end, however, her office shakeups portend a more earth-shattering change to come. Many of us chose to come to Brown because of its unique educational philosophy, and any departures from that philosophy stand to leave the student body feeling betrayed and alienated from the school we have grown to call our own. If there is one thing that Bergeron and Simmons need to remember when implementing such radical changes, it is that for us students there is no place like home.
Adam Cambier '09 would ask the Wizard to bring back donuts to Sunday brunch at the Ratty.
