It wasn’t a deal breaker for S26, as you know he’s attending Wes this fall, but those dark, dreary stacks were noticed. The outside of the building, the lobby and the big reading rooms are lovely, but it quickly goes downhill once you start moving from one floor to the next. Maybe Wes will think about updating Olin now that the Science center is wrapping up and the Arts center is done. 
Both of these investments meant more to him/us than the library stacks.
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I’m very ambivalent about this because the easy solution would be to make the library a closed-stack operation; the odds that people are actually checking out hard copies of books these days are fairly minimal and for the rare occasion when it happens, you should be able to just fill out a request via your phone and it will be waiting for you at a reception desk.
But I’m a browser and there is something about the smell of old books that I find rather appealing. LOL. Not having that tactile connection along with the serendipity of taking something off the shelf all by myself would be a loss.
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In good news, the church at the Air Force Academy has refurbished and will reopen soon. I think it has been closed for 2 or 3 years. Thanks taxpayers!
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Big endowments are sort of correlative with older buildings, aren’t they?
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One might hope they are also correlated with maintaining those older buildings…
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I would further say that maintenance is a function of both money and culture/organizational capability.
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So much depends on how far gone the individual buildings have become. Amherst had a sizable cluster of mid-century modern dormitories completed around 1962 that by the early 2000s had developed mold. The only solution was to completely bulldoze them in 2016:
The Social Dorms – The Consecrated Eminence
I believe similar problems beset Amherst first-year dorms Stearns and Walker, constructed shortly after WWII and razed in order to make way for their namesakes in 2005:
Stearns Hall — Amherst College Dorm Reviews | DormScouter
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My daughter is a senior at Brandeis and LOVES it. What it lacks on the outside (you aren’t wrong) it makes up for with the warm and fuzzy inside. The students and professors are the warmest, most supportive, greatest community. She has made the greatest friends, is more confident, has close relationships with professors, and has had so many leadership opportunities that she may not have gotten at a bigger school. Being an active part of the Jewish community at Brandeis has been so incredible for my daughter that I can’t even think of a strong enough word - transformative? life-changing? (Happy to discuss specifics in a DM if you want). Anyway, you are right that Brandeis is doing a terrible job of selling itself. They are finally starting to work on the physical campus, and they have a lot of work to do with marketing, especially to the Jewish community. I hope the powers that be at Brandeis see posts like yours and understand that they need to make important changes so that more kids can have an experience as wonderful as we have. Good luck on your search.
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Or an overly meddlesome legislature that mandates the use of appropriated money for certain expenditures while not providing additional funds to take care of deferred maintenance.
(Not that that’s a problem in my state, no if course not, why would you ever begin to use logic and think that?)
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The dorm tour caused my kid to switch from Purdue to Alabama…..over crowded triple with hallway shower to solo and shared bathroom with one. Definitely - as in every situation - different strokes for different folks. But as he was committed, it definitely moved the needle and the funny thing is, he only visited as it was college visit day in high school and he joined friends or he would never have stepped foot on campus. It’d be nice if all schools could show any areas of importance to kids but sadly they can’t. But a dorm seems something that should be shown to all - in some capacity anyway - IMHO.
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I very much like the way the U of North Texas handles it—they have a model dorm room attached to the visitors center, so if you come by for a tour you can take a look on your own time, and there are no privacy worries.
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That is a good idea, but now I can’t get UVA’s Edgar Allan Poe dorm room out of my head!
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I did not have a student attend there, but Vassar is my all time favorite most beautiful campus!!
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No doubt a beautiful campus. The Shakespeare Garden and Library are my favorites.
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I have been in quite a few MIT buildings, and many are very dumpy in terms of halls, bathrooms, etc.
My partner works with quite a few alums, and they described it as simultaneously “living/thinking into the far future while also living 50 years in the past” at all times (or some such thing..)
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I’m stealing that one, too. 
The “new” reading room, Olin Library, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, USA. This room is in the 1986 extension to the library. The 1938 exterior wall forms one of the rows of this room
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One of my friends at the AI Lab was a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club, and gave me a tour when it was still in Building 20 (only members had a key to the TMRC, so this was a rare treat). The TMRC was not quite 50 years old at that time, but it seemed a lot older than that to me when my friend gleefully showed off all the exciting ancient tech it was built with. Ah, memories…
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has a storied history, inventing the (or at least arguably) the word “hack” in the sense of computers/electrical things..
Another fun combination of old and new..
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