Will hopefully be in The Metro

The Metro

Rock Out with Your…Um, Rock Out?

As Frost once noted, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” So how long can FDU entertain a rock? Reuter’s Rock is a massive, brightly-painted eyesore that stands near the mansion in one of the campus’s most picturesque areas. According to FDU’s website, “It was dubbed years ago by students in honor of a former faculty member with a reputation for being ‘hard as a rock.’”

Professor Reuter, a take-no-crap professor that evidently had to sit down during lectures every time he wore a pair of polyester slacks.

The site doesn’t comment on the date the rock was instituted, which either means God created it on the third day and saw that it was good, it rose from the ground when the continents broke apart, or FDU chose a discount web developer who figured for ten dollars and fifty cents an hour getting the name right was good enough.

The rock is used in the spirit of FDU: it hosts advertisements for upcoming events that probably no student of FDU’s will attend, with new upcoming events regularly painted over previous failures. This was the brainchild of a student who grew a bias against fliers after his “Everything-Must-Go!” garage sale was an utter failure. The student was forced to rent a storage unit when he decided that he couldn’t simply throw away things he knew people could use.

Fraternities and sororities also use Reuters’ Rock for advertisements, which are always painted in the most enticing diction. The rock has recently featured such blurbs as “Join the Brotherhood,” suggesting a clan of cave dwellers whose members found rubbing the blood of virgins against your temples eliminates crow’s-feet. Such effective diction is absolutely mandatory when trying to convince people to pay dues to be friends with you.

And just this semester, Reuter’s has donned the title of the book The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri. I have not had a chance to read the book, but walking past Reuter’s one day the name alone, painted on that archaic rock, was enough to make me want to slay my first-born brother. However, since I only have a younger brother who lives an hour away in west Jersey I decided against the trip. It wasn’t worth it with gas prices today, and that’s before the tolls!

In the end, in an age when we’re all inundated with information, is it really necessary to print news on a rock? I may not be an aesthete, but if it’s about artistic expression, students can still be content in the usage of their usual canvases—bathroom stalls and desktops. It’s possible that no one remembers exactly when the rock rolled in, but we can all watch it roll away.