This Week in (Williams) History

From this week's edition of the Williams Record:

1989 The Admissions Office brings in truckloads of "fake flakes" to winterize the campus for a reshooting of the prospectus. In addition to the manmade winter, photographers manufacture cozy fireside study sessions in one corner of the Perry living room and arrange Stetson tutorials complete with posed professors, borrowed briefcases and busts of famous academics brought in for the occasion.

Bringing in the busts of famous academics (academicians?) cracks me up. Yes, we like to cultivate the impression that a Williams education is conducted under the benevolent gaze of the great minds who have gone before us. My question is, why just bring them in for the prospectus? Shouldn't we have them around all the time? You might say that the prospectus is never going to accurately reflect the college because it's an artificial marketing tool designed to make the college look better than it really is. But that's begging the question. If it looks better in the prospectus, why shouldn't it look better in real life, too? If this is how we want college to be, why not make it that way in real life instead of constructing these fantasies and then dismantling them again? If the prospectus is not going to imitate college life, then maybe it's time that college life start imitating the prospectus. We could do with some more busts of famous academics around, not to mention those cozy fireside study sessions. Also, everyone needs to be uniformly good-looking, and no picture should contain more than one person of any given ethnicity and no more than sixty percent of either gender. It should always be summer, the peak of autumn when the foliage is at its most glorious, or immediately after a fresh winter snowfall when all is clear and pristine. And these are only a few of the ways in which college life stands to benefit from imitating the prospectus. I'm sure the Admissions office and the CUL could team up and think of a lot more instead of debating all this anchor house business. I'm sure I could think up a lot more right now, but I'm late to my photo-op. Look for me in the prospectus, practicing the cello beneath a flowering cherry tree in the bright spring sunlight, except I'll be of ambiguous ethnicity, and a girl.