BY SHAYNA DEMICK
Opinion Columnist
Many students at the university, when asked about things they enjoy about the school, will say that they really enjoy the campus. The campus has a historic, rustic feel and the brick pathways add a nice vibrancy to the already lush greenery. When being inside lecture halls becomes too stressful, students will spend time on the Green to escape. Who knew it was actually going to be the Green that was escaping?
A recent internet trend has come about called “Devious Licking.” The trend consists of students stealing oddly specific parts and items from public facilities. Teenagers have been known to take water piping, sink nozzles, signs and furniture.
University students could not resist this opportunity for rebellion and thus debuted their own form of Devious Licking: “Devious Bricking.” It began with a couple of bricks next to the Green and progressed as students took apart the entire walkway.
University students are notoriously hard workers and when they fixate on a goal they make sure to achieve it by any means necessary. Even if it means finding an alternate path to class because the path that you used to take doesn’t exist anymore. No, really, it’s gone.
A few days after the Licking started, university facility services put cones around the missing bricks and had the ground repaired. The fight seemed to be over — but it had only just begun.
Still buzzing from the rush of relocating old bricks, students have not been able to resist the thrill of taking other campus fixtures. More and more of the campus disappears. Random sections of the walkways simply vanish, sometimes in a matter of minutes. You will leave for lunch and return to see that the ground previously in front of the dining hall no longer exists.
Benches all around campus are gone. Other benches are now upside down with bricks balanced on their legs. The meaning of this arrangement is unknown. Elevator signs are gone. The cones that used to protect the brick holes are gone. Rumor has it that the squirrels on campus are also disappearing.
I’ve been told that a person who looked suspiciously like me was spotted stealing a brick. I will not stand for such slander — I’m 50% sure that it wasn’t me. Besides, this particular brick had already been removed from a walkway and orphaned across campus. It was lonely and abandoned on the grass by Caesar Rodney, no doubt from someone’s failed “Devious Bricking” experience. Perhaps my doppelganger was simply helping a fellow peer out by finishing the job they couldn’t do themselves. If anything, it’s a symbol of this unknown person’s selfless nature.
Despite the repeated repairs, the brick pathways have been destroyed time and time again. More and more of the campus is dissolving by the hour. If this goes on much longer, students will have to float to class. If the university has to install a fresh walkway each morning, chances are that they will implement a brick tax. Never mind the cost of shipping in replacement squirrels!
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can barely afford tuition as it is. How will we explain to our parents the brick surcharge added to our tuition? Fire-drill drug checks will be replaced by “Devious Bricker” searches and bench-flipper shakedowns. Is this who we are now?
Why are people still taking bricks? Unless you’re building a house with your bare hands between chem and comp-sci, you probably don’t actually need a brick. If dismantling the campus and squirrel-napping have become the things that get you up in the morning, maybe it’s time for a heart-to-heart with yourself. For me, coffee gets me up in the morning. If only I still had a way to walk to Dunkin’ to get said coffee.
We are locked in a race between vanishing and rebuilding and the vanishing is winning. Soon there will be only a field where our campus once was, and that’s too bad because I kind of like our campus. If we must dismantle it, we should pick something that nobody will truly miss or care about, like the cones blocking the bike lanes.
