Iowa State Day

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Today was Iowa State day. Greg's cousin Linda, a current undergrad, gave us a grand tour. Oh, how different Iowa State is from BU. To start, it has a campus. And what a campus. So green, and everything in bloom, the green campus vistas dotted with purple and pink and white blossoms every direction. You could take BU's green space - the tiny sliver of grass behind the library and next to Storrow Drive, known as the "BU Beach" - and fit it into 1/10th of the small quad at ISU.

It looks as a college campus should - clean and green (did I mention the green?) with paths crisscrossing at architecturally pleasing angles, a majestic campanile that chimes every half hour, the buildings a mix of styles from gothic to modern to New England red brick. There's a lovely lush pond with a beloved pair of swans (Lancelot and Elaine). The student union overlooks the pond. The student union is big and has a bowling alley and a lovely open-air bookstore and several cozy sitting rooms with fireplaces. The library is gorgeous and well-designed - a library within a library, airy and bright, like a museum. If BU's library is a five-story brutalist concrete bunker, Iowa State's is a palace of books. With a coffee shop and a reading room to die for.

But ISU is a science and technology campus, most obviously. The science buildings overtake the campus - genetics, mechanical engineering, agricultural engineering, horticulture, chemistry, biology, agronomy, the vet school. There are paddocks with baby horses and cows with cannulas in their stomachs so researchers can reach in and check out their digestion ("Be sure to wear gloves," I was warned, as if I would ever have the opportunity to reach into a cow's innards, "because you can't get that smell off your hands for weeks.") There are rows of greenhouses and an insectary. If the breeze is right, you get whiffs of fertilizer.

We toured the liberal arts buildings and I found them disappointingly utilitarian. Cement block walls, classrooms with no windows, old fashioned desks and chalkboards. This is where I would be teaching. And what sort of students would I be teaching? Linda told us stories about the students she TAs in her agronomy labs, "Iowa farm boys" that occasionally have been kicked out for drunkenness or vulgarity towards the female TAs.

Then there was Ames. The downtown is lovely - all two blocks of it. The rest is sprawl. Hy-vees and Panera Breads and Exxons. And a virtual Camazotz of student apartment buildings, acres off them, off the interstate, and with a view of nothing but the flat Iowa distance. We ate dinner at a popular local restaurant and everything was cooked with butter - the vegetables, the meat - and it gave me a terrible stomachache.

As lovely as it was, I could not quite picture myself living here. There's something to be said for that nebulous charm of "fit," and ISU doesn't have it. I worry that KU won't have it either. Or WVU. And yet somehow I must make this choice.