'Pearsons,' Crookshank Just Euphemisms for Love
By Michael Owen
Opinions Editor

On the way to four of my classes (I am only taking four classes, so that’s all of them), I walk past the hollow shell known, apparently, as “Pearsons Hall.” “Pearsons Hall” is reportedly undergoing a renovation, and by “renovation” I mean that “Pearsons Hall” is being replaced, inch-by-stuccoed inch, with a new, safer, painted concrete-and-rebar “Pearsons Hall” that will more closely resemble the structure as it appeared shortly after its construction, which took place during the natal period of Philosophy Professor Frederick Sontag, and will also have a red tile roof.

Right. Its original appearance. So someone is going to go back in time, to whatever war or financial crisis during which “Pearsons Hall” was built in order to give people jobs to raise money for the war effort or resolve the financial crisis, and figure out how it appeared originally. Never mind that Pomona’s idea of making something look how it appeared originally is to strip it of any existing character, level it, and rebuild a painted concrete-and-rebar version before anyone notices; someone is going to go back in time anyway, because Pomona feels strongly about making administrative decisions on the strength of indisputable research. (“Indisputable research” is the term used to describe an Executive Summary of the stick figures President Stanley draws on the inexpensive blue napkin that is supposed to be a coaster for his small clear plastic cup of water at Trustee meetings.)

Problem with this idea: traveling that far back in time is impossible. At best, you might go back in time to 1981. Probably you would emerge from your “time machine,” only to discover that Pomona did not actually exist in 1981. In fact, Pomona did not exist until 1989, when a group of educational idealists who were very drunk and also well-financed because of a recent “ocaine-cay” deal decided to make a “fantasy college” complete with historical photographs—borrowed from Stanford University and one of those small east-coast colleges we’re obsessed with becoming better than (“Number five! Number five! Eat that with some of your snow, bitch!”), both of whom agreed to give us the photographs because they were old and junky and the schools did not want to be associated with monochromatic portrayals of frowning men in full-body bathing suits—which were actually the Stanford-and-snowy-college photographs airbrushed in combinations designed to lend Pomona an air of historical gravity, or grave history, and then placed in ugly frames from the 1940s along a hallway somewhere in Rains Center so that most of the time no one would have to look at them, because the frames are ugly and the people in the photos look ridiculous. The reason they look ridiculous is that they are black-and-white-and-gray people, and they are wearing the type of athletic clothing that was fashionable at Swarthmore in the 1940s, such as rubber pants. Also, they are airbrushed onto a fountain that is in fact located at Amherst.

Even if Pomona had existed when “Pearsons Hall” was supposedly constructed, it seems arbitrary to make it look like it did then. Instead, we should stop the renovation now, because at the moment “Pearsons Hall” looks exactly as it did after the French bombing of sleepy Claremont during World War II. Personally, I prefer the bombed-out look to the goody-goody-building-from-the-1800s look, especially when one considers that the northern half of said building collapsed shortly after its construction and the college—consistent with its long-standing policy of making everything that happens within a fifty-mile radius of its campus into a favorable press release on the official college website, accompanied by photographs of smiling white, black, Latino, Cambodian, gay, and arthritic students dressed in clothes from 1993 and standing next to a fountain that looks like it is a fountain at Occidental College that the students have been airbrushed onto—“converted” it, in November of 1943, into the long-awaited Crookshank Hall, which was so long-awaited that it ran out of room for the Zoology Department when the English Department moved in the following month to accommodate the construction workers in “Pearsons Hall,” which was undergoing a renovation, and so the zoology department dissolved and its faculty was commissioned to raise seed money for a “fantasy college” that would begin construction in 1989.

So even if you could go further into the past, all you would see is a heaping pile of rubble (the collapsed portion of Pearsons, bombed) that “professors” were “teaching” in because it was “Crookshank Hall.” If you took detailed notes on the pertinent architectural details, your notes would not help to achieve the aims of the current renovation because France is too busy electing fascist politicians to bother with bombing “Pearsons Hall” again just so it will look the way it did after the first time they bombed it, during World War II. Germany is also busy.

Compounding the problem, someone scraped “Fa” and “y” off the doors of the stairwell that leads downstairs in Smith Campus Center, whose basement is the current “Philosophy Department,” and also the other “Departments” that have been located in “Pearsons Hall” since its construction in 1989. As a result, the doors now read “cult Offices,” which is sort of as if they were reading something written by Scientologists. Now everyone who goes into the Smith Campus Center “Philosophy Department” emerges financially and emotionally devastated by the professors, who have decided to go with the flow and form cults, in their offices. It is fortunate for the professors that Smith Campus Center exists now, because otherwise they would have to be running their cults from “Crookshank Hall.”

Frankly, the goal of reconstructing “Pearsons Hall” just so its faculty can use a well-furnished temporary basement office as a front for religious extortion seems like an inappropriate expenditure of college funds, like the ill-conceived Tremendous Saltwater Aquarium built on Marston Quad in 1997, which quickly turned into a horrible embarrassment for the college because it was leaking and also a tremendous saltwater aquarium, until later that year when it was demolished by tornado just in time for Commencement. Thankfully, “Pearsons” is unlikely to meet a similar fate, except for right now, when neither furniture nor books can hold it down to protect it against a tornado because they are in the “cult Offices.” If Pomona wants to improve its infrastructure, I suggest a parking lot. Lots of people do not have anywhere to park, and when all of their cars are in the new parking lot the English department faculty can relocate into the cars (because they, the faculty, are flexible), freeing up space in Crookshank for zoology, or a renovation.