To the rear of Sherman Dining Hall, encircled on three sides by the tired brick edifices of the Massell Quad, is a little pond. The body of water is largely inornate. There is a low stone wall at one edge and some shrubbery along the other. There is a bench too, which would be idyllic if not for the ragged stump next to it. This is the fixture around which many of our first-years dwell. They skirt the water and the wall every time they are hungry or on the rare occasion that an in-person class demands their presence. I am sure many of them trudge right past that bench and grey stump with only the shimmer of a recollection that a grand willow once set the tone for that entire courtyard. Next year’s touring first-years will remember nothing of it at all.
In my uneducated opinion, that willow was the saving grace of Massell Quad, the lever that kept the bricks from suffocating every last soul forced to live in that place. I say “uneducated” because I was a midyear, which in 2017 meant that I studied somewhere else during my first semester of college and moved into the Village Quad in the spring. I hear some midyears nowadays are forced to live in the squalor of the regular first-year dorms. That strikes me as a very bad deal, but that is a subject for another time. I had the privilege of living my life without giving the normal first-year dorms a second thought, but that beautiful old willow swaying above the pond drew me in and rooted me to that bench more times than I would like to admit. The pond looks like a drowned lawn without it.
The willow is a corpse now, and likely an accidental one. The Brandeis administration has a penchant for destroying valuable artifacts and trees alike, but I don’t think anybody made the conscious decision to kill this one. The stump is jagged and torn. Flaps of bark flesh jut unevenly from the edges of the thing, and if one peers closely into the pond itself, it is possible to make out whiplike branches with foliage still attached. If a person did this, they must have been using their teeth. More likely, an unfortunate summer storm tore trunk from foot and sent the old willow to a watery grave. Freak accidents like these remind us that the world is still very much alive and needs to be cared for.
The loss of the willow is the latest in a long list of radical physical changes that Brandeis campus has undergone in the three years that I have attended this institution. The first and most extreme of these was the demolition of Usen Castle, the near century old literal castle that used to dominate the campus. There is a reason Brandeis used to hold a reputation as a school for Harry Potter fanatics.
Living in the castle was a legitimate reason for coming to this school back when I applied to the university, and myself and many others were burned to find that it was already being destroyed by the time we got here. To first-years today, I imagine that the existence of the castle is just another piece of trivia delivered during the Skyline portion of the tour. I won’t speak of Skyline further—it is an aesthetic abomination and a smothering of resources.
Some changes, like the loss of a willow, are less dramatic, but they are not lost upon observant students. I lived in East after Skyline was constructed and I still recall the day that the chainsaws came. The steep hill that separates Loop Road and the Skyline embankment from East proper was once dressed with trees. We didn’t have to look at the shiny monster from our brick hovel because we literally couldn’t for the most part. In a single day, however, the whole strand was cut down. The nondiscretion with which Brandeis lets go of its foliage is at times maddening. The hill in Fellows Garden that holds up the Louis Brandeis statue was planted with trees at one time too, but the hill was dug up and trimmed bald just last year. With each passing month, I seem to notice more and more stumps dotting the Brandeis landscape.
All of this is to say that campuses are like small cities—they never stop changing. If left unchecked, Brandeis might someday look like one big glass cube, a hyper-Skyline, fully air-conditioned. The natural spaces are hard to get back. I’m not even sure anybody beyond the environmental studies department is giving much care to exactly how much the ecology of this place has changed in the last sixty years. The willow went down without any formal response from the campus. It was a death silent and unseen, and there is no justice in that.
