That’s a measure of how bad Bartlett is.

Bartlett 67 is the weirdest lecture hall on campus. It’s supposed to be both an auditorium and a theater – Student Valley Productions has the annual Comedy Jam in there in April and once in a while the Theater Guild has a show on – but fails at both. It sucks as a theater because the stage is so high you’re practically looking up the actors’ skirts – if you don’t sit so far that it’s impossible to hear them. The acoustics are awful. You can hear the conversation eleven rows back about Eli Manning or the latest issue of “Cosmopolitan” loud and clear, but without a microphone you can’t hear the professor at all.

The chairs are so old the cushions have lost their shape entirely and those desks – only a few inches wide are impossible to work with. I had a calculus exam in there once and it was impossible. There was no room on the desk for the exam or the sheet of the paper we were doing our work on and if you were writing something down and got too close to that curved edge, hello huge hole in the paper. My exam must have looked like it had been attacked by Mutant Killer Termites from Neptune.

Bartlett lacks a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system. This means that over the winter group in-class projects are a must to allow students to huddle together for warmth. I’ve taken a few double-length classes in the library, always with very few other students. In Bartlett in the winter we would have been in real danger of hypothermia.

The building is also, quite frankly, butt-ugly. The architecture positively reeks of a short-lived, hedonist love affair between a classic collegiate style and the 1950’s. Outside, that little garden rarely has anything growing in it. Whether that’s because of all the garbage that’s accumulated there over the years, or because Bartlett’s hip “L” shape blocks the sunlight, is difficult to tell. The interior isn’t very good, either. Naturally “slate gray” was chosen to be the dominant color because it’s so exciting and stimulating. God knows University of Massachusetts students could always use some more bland and unappealing in their lives. Department offices are cramped and narrow, while the hallways are poorly lit. The vending machines in the lobby have stolen money on more than one occasion, and the computers can be very slow at times.

Normally I balk at the University spending $85 million on new building projects, although with the state contributing $65 million, it’s more like $20 million. But they’re going to replace Bartlett Hall with a building that, cross my heart and hope to die, will have working thermostats.

Bartlett is also home to the English Department. Collectively, English Departments are recognized the all over the world as the most useless wastes of space and resources. Don’t get the wrong impression. I have known many fine English majors. They’re quality people and I believe them when they say it’s not their fault that they slacked off so much that their only option was to major in English or Biology and they didn’t like the idea of dissection. But that still doesn’t excuse English Departments from offering the most useless college degree ever. There’s nothing you can do with an English degree that a more practical degree, such as Basket Weaving, would not also qualify you for. On top of that, if you major in Basket Weaving, you are also qualified to weave baskets and probably those straw hats farmers are stereotypically associated with.

Back to the point: Bartlett is an improperly heated, horribly plumbed, English professor-infested architectural blight on this campus. If we’re lucky, no one will be hurt when the next big gust of wind off DuBois blows it over.

Matthew M. Robare is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [email protected].