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 After
a search that has lasted most of a decade, Boston University has finally
settled on a new Commandant, er, President, to
replace Aram Chobanian, current interim president and somniferous presence,
who replaced the stillborn presidency of ex-NASA Czar, Daniel
Goldin, paid
over $2,000,000 to walk away from the job a few days before he was supposed
to start
(an employment strategy the Dowbrigade has been attempting to emulate,
unsuccessfully, ever since), who was hired to replace President Emeritus
and dominating presence John
Silber, referred to by Goldin as a "Paranoid Megalomaniac".
The latest individual selected for this star-crossed
post is a lesser-known local luminary, Robert
A. Brown, provost of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and the Dowbrigade is personally delighted.
We have always enjoyed Techies, and our forays into their territory rank
among the most interesting and bizarre experiences in our long anthropological
career.
Just this past Saturday we joined a group of them in
a ritual celebration in a nondescript Chinese restaurant near their natural
habitat in Central Square, Cambridge. They were dressed in all of their
socially significant plumage for the special occasion (it was the birth-anniversary
of one of the members of the tribe); carefully chosen counter-fashions
of drab polyester and worn flax, a multitude of pockets to hold icons,
charms and fetishes, and a ritualistic shunning of all body decoration
or accoutrements – no studs, earrings or body art visible.
Although they made a an effort to keep the conversation
accessible to an outsider like the Dowbrigade, by mid-meal, as they feverishly
passed around exotic and ceremonial dishes with names like "Cabbage
Crud Capons" and "Spongeaform Squid Savories" they broke into a highly
stylized dialect of "Geek-Speak", their tribal language, utterly opaque
to uninitiated outsiders.
But their sense of humor was obvious, despite the incomprehensibility
of the actual jokes, through their harsh, hesitant laughter and their
drool-enhanced smiles, and the rain of tiny food particles filtering
down on the table as they enjoyed the good humor.
Our infatuation with MIT Geeks is not new. When we moved
to Cambridge to attend the "other" institution down Bullshit Boulevard,
we discovered that two members of our high school graduating class, the
REALLY smart kids, were there, and through them we gained entry to the
alien and fascinating world culture of the gear head nation.
One thing we discovered early back in the day
was that despite their almost total lack of social graces, those MIT
kids
really
knew
how to
party. No MIT get-together was complete without a large tank of Nitrous
Oxide and some weird science toy like a shrunken marmoset or an experimental
defibrillator, which the guests could play with in creative ways. There
was also always plenty of good booze and often a collection of weird
drugs no one else had ever heard of yet.
So we applaud the election of a MIT man to head the
institution where we spend some of our professional time. We expect great
things from President Brown, if he is anything like the MIT grads we
know. He will probably need an interpreter and an intensive session with
the Queer Eye crew if he hopes to cut a dashing figure at fundraising
soirees, but the intellectual tone on campus should be cranked up several
notches, and after five or ten years of serious, sober leadership maybe
BU will cease to the the laughingstock of American higher education it
is today.
At the very least, we may see a return of a sense of
humor to the Charles River campus, still living a kind of cold war blend
of skepticism and cynicism after Silber’s reign of terror, which had
Soviet technocratic
overtones of secrecy, betrayal and revenge, and featured a wholesale
dismissal of faculty who dared to dream of organizing themselves in
resistance to
the regime. MITers are famous for their ingenious and sophisticated
pranks, like
placing cop cars and bi-planes
on the roof of their library. Let’s hope this catches on at BU.
Maybe Brown, being a true son of the Lonestar State,
will bring back BU’s
lost but not forgotten football team, eradicated
as being "off-mission" by Silber the
year after winning the NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP (Div. II). After all, even
MIT has a football team….
from the Boston Globe
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