A thread for pretentiously "down to earth" public college fuxors

What's UB?

(What's RU?)

xpost Haha - just because you're at Buffalo doesn't mean you're of it, I guess.

Oh, I am definitely of Buffalo, originally. But, I peaced outta there about a year and a half ago to work at a frightfully private and pretentious university.

just because you're at Buffalo doesn't mean you're of it, I guess.

This actually seems somewhat apt re UB.

Do you live in the city (the Heights or elsewhere?) or on campus?

My friend went to Mount Allison in NB, and I know that was an uber-private school. Is UT (Toronto) considered private? They have some lovely libraries.

I was under the impression that at least in Ontario just about all universities are public, although in the last ten years or so they've allowed a couple schools to offer some totally private programmes? I could easily be wrong though. Thought U of T was public. Barry?

I think you might be right about UT and the rest of them. I actually used to work for the Canadian gov't (the Consulate in the HSBC tower downtown), and I think everything is pretty socialized, so peeps are free to go where they want. I helped many a folk with their student visas. Maybe I just remember my friend talking about Mt. Allison re: it being a good school. I dunno. It's in a place called Sackville. That alone scares me enough. He would talk about drinkin' screech a lot.

Are you studying music? I worked at UB's music library for a spell the fall of '05.

-- Eisbär (llamasfu...), December 13th, 2006.

I knew you were an RU guy, but what year did you graduate?

I was RC '02 with a major in English, minor in Music.

Elmwood seems probably the coolest part of the city, at least the Allentown-ish part of it. I'm still debating whether to move out around there for next year. I'd absolutely need to get a car if I did, given the state of public transportation here. May well stay up here though. The isolation can be conducive to studying.

When I was applying to undergrad schools in Ontario, we just had to fill out one standardized form where we ticked off the schools we were interested in. It went to a single office. They wouldn't do that if some of the schools were privatized, would they?

xposts Yes, I'm studying music! Whoa, you must have worked with my friends (J05h, R3b3cc4, J4n33). I might recognize you if you have a picture on one of the picture threads.

Nashville - crazy. How do you like that? There was a girl at Creekside from Tennessee last year who had the thickest Southern accent I've ever heard.

"seems like it's probably"

OTFUCKINGM!!

Livi '09

Actually, Rutgers IS a Public Ivy, so.... at least 3 or 4 of us qualify for two ;-)

true story: i DID get asked (on a job interview in NYC way back in the late 90s) whether rutgers was an ivy. so it's true that it has that "reputation."

I don't think "Ivy" is an especially useful term for anything but the 8 schools (and even then it isn't especially useful, except as an historic designation or to the extent to which it remains a salient brand), and my pedant side points out that 2 of the actual Ivies are public or quasi-public. But if you want to create a figurative 8-school 'public Ivy' league of state universities, I think most people, including Easterners who would be more inclined to go to school in the midwest than in Texas, would probably include UT-Austin on a list with at least Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Wisconsin, UVA, and UNC. Never mind that a couple of other California schools, the U of Washington, Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Penn State all might be better these days.

im blonde on the left

Ally, obv I know that you know Pete! dc_faps.xls!!

I don't find that to be the case at all. I mean, if Stanford is the Harvard of the bay area, then Cal is MIT. You didn't go to "public school" unless you went to CSU Hayward, in my opinion.

Not saying that Cal deserves a fancy reputation, just that it has one.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), December 14th, 2006.

I really didn't give it much thought.

Not saying that Cal deserves a fancy reputation, just that it has one.

Wasn't 100% serious.

But Berkeley has a reputation that varies a *lot* actually, in my experience. Internationally (esp. Asia) the brand name is behind Harvard/Stanford/Yale...but that's about it. In-state the rep is a little lower than that, and out of state, especially on the East Coast, the reputation seems far lower.

CSU Hayward is now CSU East Bay, btw.

No not really, there's no reason to want to go there.

personally, I'd probably rather do undergrad at Princeton, Penn, Chicago, Cornell, Brown, Rice, Pomona or Dartmouth over Berkeley, even if Berkeley is a better university in a better location than any of these. And if it were between Berkeley and Duke or Northwestern or Wash U or Hopkins or Georgetown or Michigan or UVA (or Swarthmore/Amherst/Williams/Carleton/Haverford/Wesleyan (or Wellesley or Barnard if I were a girl)), I'd have to think about it. And I'm not alone there.

But anyway, Stanford is a great school that I never would have been able to afford. Cal was both very good and (as an in-state resident) very, very cheap.

yes, but even in a good year, isn't it a bigger deal at the state school dominated by californians?

Cal was both very good and (as an in-state resident) very, very cheap.

right, i'm presenting only an out-of-state perspective

Livingston builds character

speaking as someone who lived in the livingston quads and rode the l bus for my entire college career, i concur. i used to sneer at the demarest kids on college avenue, barely able to hide my jealousy. there is actually a facebook group called "Livingston Campus: Worse Than A Rejection Letter."

I don't find that to be the case at all. Cal students are, overall, pretty liberal and concerned more with SAVE PEOPLE'S PARK, MAAAAN than with sports. Most sporting events at Cal, historically, have been very underattended. Basketball and football have been somewhat popular, but compared to at a school with a real tradition like UCLA or UNC, it isn't even close.

I think also you're forgetting that while there may not be many non-Californian Americans, there are TONS of international students.

and if you're very self-motivated and want to spend your time in college holed up in a lab, Berkeley is hard to beat.

It really depends on your program. If you're in the sciences, yeah, sure, the enormity of the school allows a lot of latitude for self-motivation and creative isolation. I was in the English department, and the program is really quite huge. My graduating class was enormous. But I had a personal relationship with most of my instructors and many of my classmates, and access to all the poets on their lecture tours (Milosz, Ashberry, etc., etc...), and access to magnificent libraries, and personal interaction with some pretty excellent academics (Judith Butler, John Searle, Ishmael Reed, Thom Gunn, Robert Hass, Charles Altieri...).

-- nuneb (gabbne...), December 15th, 2006. (nuneb)

when i visited dartmouth, it felt kinda like a wasteland. it was a good-looking campus, but i immediately stopped filling out the app when i got home

Charles Mingus was a prof at UB, but only for a semester. I did a project in the special collections room at the Music Library which included me reading all the articles re: Mingus' brief tenure. From what I gathered, he was drunk a lot, and stopped people during their solos at concerts, and berated them.

The whole "Buffalo in June" (is that what it's called?) thing is and was pretty impressive! I tried reading "On the Wires of Our Nerves" which Lejaren Hiller et al. wrote, but it was way over my head.

Michel Foucault taught at UB in the 70s. I learned this by working at UB's archives.

yeah, i never visited and didn't apply. the best reason to go there as far as I can see is if you want lots of outdoor sports or other activities (in, uh, February in New Hampshire or something) in addition to good academics. plus, native americans. but i got pretty turned off the LAC thing when i visited swarthmore, which seemed great on paper, but was pretty depressing in person, and haverford, which was nice in person, but maybe a little small and camp-like. and while dartmouth is technically a university, and arguably (but not necessarily) preferable to any LAC, it's still basically a big college in the middle of nowhere, and a fratty one at that (plus vocal right-wing minority) even if the culture changed fairly significantly in the 90s or earlier.

Um, again, I was joking.

Dunno if you've been keeping up with the news, but currently there's a plan to build a high-tech athletic center right next to the football stadium, which means cutting down some old oak tries. So obviously there's protesters in the trees, petitions against it etc. etc.

I think it's interesting, because it's symbollically a pretty direct clash between the "Are we actually a sports school?" side of Cal and the remnants of 60s Berkeley activism.

Don't you know Cal students don't have senses of humor.

June In Buffalo should be good next year with Steve Reich and Arditti String Quartet coming. It's enough to make me consider paying the ludicrous $600 fee to participate.

I don't know that Lejaren Hiller book but his String Quartet No. 5 (In Quarter-Tones) is pretty intense.

OMG I'm the same way! So you know the aching pains of wanting to go do something on a Thursday night (or Friday night, or, hell, all of Saturday day) and realizing you're going to have to wait 20 minutes for an L that'll take 15 minutes to get to college ave (as you watch 3 B's drive by) because no parties ever happen on or near Livingston. And they've gotten rid of the G/GG to cook/douglass and implemented the REXL and REXB, which only go as far as the student center, so I have to walk there from Quad 3 constantly, which is a bitch.

I always told people the only thing keeping me out of Demarest was Brower (I really do luv Tillett more), but yeah I really wanted to live there.

Did you ever know Bill Stella at WRSU? He's still around...

man, 18 years since graduation and i'm still mad at the ru screw. i guess it does permanent damage.

I also ate a Fat Bitch for the first time last night. It was so greasy but so good. So, so good.

a story about "the fat bitch" and one RU prof's general take on the whole university

HOW DO I SWOTCH SCHOOL

I was editor of the Rutgers Review, so there was some competition there, but I don't think we ever succeeded in defining ourselves as well as they did.