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The 1985 sports car currently parked outside of Barus and Holley has many Brown students wondering exactly what the Brown Physics Department has been up to of late.
"There's no reason for all this suspicion," said Department Chair and Brown Physics Intergalactic Hegemony Councilmember Chung-I Tan. "The only story here is that my Ford broke down and I needed a new car."
However, many students are left skeptical due to the variety of drastic, unexplained changes around campus.
For example, funding previously believed to be reserved for the Brown Athletics Department is currently being used to fund salary increases for various Physics professors and adjunct lecturers. University financial records indicate that the funds were reallocated in 1955, but no Brown representative can recall the change being made.
"It does seem odd," said Alex Rosenthal, Vice Chair of the Undergraduate Finance Board, "but it isn't as though somebody could have changed over 50 years worth of well-guarded records overnight."
Not in the present they couldn't have.
Further suspicion was aroused by the Faunce House Physics Annex, allegedly established in 1957, which nobody on campus can recall existing last week.
"These allegations are absurd!" exclaimed Tan. "The Physics Annex is a well-established part of this University. Without it we would never be able to effectively govern the entire galaxy, which I might add we have been doing quite well for over 30 years now."
Tan added that he had never even heard of a flux capacitor, and that the very idea of one is "simply preposterous."
Nonetheless, there is a growing movement among athletes on campus to change the Brown mascot back to the Bear, claiming that the "Brown Cosmic Background Radiations" doesn't exactly lend itself to any catchy cheers.
The mascot switch, coincidentally, was also made in 1955.
Possibly the greatest outrage though is the number of students who are becoming increasingly convinced that they applied to Brown on the pretense that the University's humanities departments were among the strongest in the northeastern United States, only to find that English, History, Philosophy, Sociology, Foreign Languages, and Political Science are not offered here.
"The Brown Polytechnic Institute has become far too unilateral in its approach to academics over the past fifty years," said Lee Morgan '08, founder of the Bring Humanities Back to Brown initiative.
"Students have the right to choose what they want to learn and study a range of disciplines over their four years here."
Some members of the initiative point to Dartmouth's lack of core curriculum as an excellent model for BPI, but most doubt that University administrators would ever allow such a drastic change. Apparently, Brown just isn't the place it was fifty years ago.
