CRUSTY

I prefer the older, crustier parts of the Hollins campus to the cleaner, more modern parts.

Make no mistake, the Richard Wetherill Visual Arts Center is fantastic. It’s new, sleek, tripped out with everything a student would need for the study of studio art and history, film, photography.

But it’s the not-perfect spots on the campus that make me feel like I belong here.

Cracking whitewash, old bricks that don’t quite match, poured concrete steps that have worn to a glossy shine...there are corners of the Hollins campus that makes me think of Furman University, circa 1988. Before they fixed it up...put those really colorful directional signs and banners everywhere. When you fed the ducks in the lake. Before the campus Starbucks.

The “Country Club of the South T-shirt” days.

Hollins seems to have been around for a while. And isn’t going away any time soon.