In the most recent issue of the Argus, the Ampersand forgot to send up Williams, which apparently is also making the claim of being a “college.” Now I am from Williamstown, Mass. and as much as I love Wesleyan, it isn’t right to insult one’s hometown, even in the name of college rivalry or humor. So I don’t think I should be the one to tell you about the courses they have there like “Being Uptight and Only Caring About Money,” “Catching Things” and “The Holocaust: Great Lie of the 20th Century.” No, I won’t tell you about the giant battery egg that they are building where Baxter Hall used to be. It wouldn’t be right for me to reveal that when asked what they liked about Williams, students cited the “refreshing hetero-normativity” and the “lack of potentially confusing dialogue and administrative transparency.” I wouldn’t want to slander the Williams sports teams by discussing the copious amounts of performance enhancing drugs they ingest and it certainly would be in bad taste to discuss Ephrem Williams’ links to Al Qaeda. So I won’t do any of that.
Instead, especially as I am abroad, I only want to have good memories of Williams such as the spring of 1999 when they forgot to have their usual pogrom. Or that time I noticed that the water in the Williams pool was less radioactive. I want to recall only the good side of Williams: the students that voted for Pat Buchanan by mistake rather than otherwise, the beautiful scenery, so carefully maintained by the Secret Police, and of course the nightlife. Oh, all the exciting things one can do in Williamstown until 7 p.m.
Before I get too nostalgic, I would like to request that the Ampersand please make fun of Williams, knocking a few more nails in the coffin of good taste, because as a Williamstown resident, I would never feel right doing so.
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