While I expect that your tongue was firmly in your cheek as you wrote your “Road Trips” article in this week’s Campus Times, but I feel that writing off Rochester as boring isn’t doing anyone any favors.
It is actually especially rich coming from a UR student. I live in the City of Rochester and know a lot of people in the community who are mystified by UR students.
They meet lots of Rochester Institute of Technology, St. John Fisher and Nazareth College students, but never any UR students because you folks never seem to leave campus to do anything in the city.
I find this to be the case myself when talking to students ? many of them have no idea where anything is in this city.
They have never been to the Public Market, never been to a club downtown to dance, never been to any of the excellent used bookstores and independent record stores littered throughout the city, never been to any of the various ethnic and would-be-bohemian restaurants and coffeehouses that are so common.
They have never been to see a classic movie at the Dryden Theater of the Eastman House ? never mind entered the International Museum of Photography of Film that is also on the same site ? never explored the rather spectacular public parks of the city, including Seneca Park, which includes much of the lower gorge of the Genesee River.
And this is just stuff that I can think of off the top of my head that is in the city proper and legally available to minors.
The Campus Times might want to take a more positive tack than running down a city that most of the students don’t know anyway. You could write a few articles about events and places in the city that could be or should be of interest to people between the ages of 18 and 21 who have a little money in the pockets.
? Bill Chaisson
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
