The Bowdoin Orient

February 2, 2001
Volume CXXXII, Number 14

Add "a touch of class" to dorm rooms

by SOME AUTHOR (Font Size 1)

Not to say that keg parties don't qualify as soirees or that stacked beer bottles aren't avant-garde, but you have to admit that Bowdoin could do with a greater touch of class. Always innovative, the Orient suggests a plan to offer just such a touch to student life.
Bowdoin owns a tremendous amount of art that never reaches Museum walls, remaining filed away in archives for years, even decades. By renting some of its vast collection of artwork to students, many works that would never see the light of day could be hung for many to see in dorm rooms across campus.
This opportunity to encounter great art in a domestic context could not help but provide interesting conversation and stimulate a greater respect for art, and for the living spaces in which such works would hang. Of course this would involve a tremendous amount of trust, but if Bowdoin were to make such an initial offer of trust, we are confident students would take such responsibility seriously.
Such a program, already successfully in place in several colleges in Cambridge University, would generate funds which could be used, among other things, to provide extra money for financial aid and promoting the arts at Bowdoin. Of course this program would be daring, but that is the very quality upon which Bowdoin claims to outshine our bevy of competing liberal arts colleges.