The Brown Noser

Issue date: 4/24/09 Section: Campus Life

Media Credit: northfieldareafoundation.org Some protestors find the heighteronormative attitude of the university appalling

In a movement its supporters call "revolutionary," growing numbers of self-defined "medium-height students" are calling for radical changes across Brown's campus - the main one being a dramatic increase in the number of "height-neutral water fountains" on campus.

"I was in MacMillan the other day, taking my normal mid-morning pit stop, when I realized I was kind of thirsty," reported prominent medium-height activist Greg Tannenwald '11. "So I walked over to the water fountains, only to find one fountain for tall people and another for short people. I was shot through with panic, knowing that, as a tallish short person, using the tall water fountain could lead to a dangerous confrontation with a person who might call me things like 'shrimp' and 'the eighth dwarf,' and using the short fountain could mark my end at the hands of a short guy spewing hate like 'giraffe,' 'the jolly green giant' and 'the human Yao Ming.'"

It was when Tannenwald walked away, he reported, "my throat parched, my tongue dry as sandpaper, crawling along the marble floors of MacMillan in what I was sure were my last minutes among the living" that he realized a change was necessary. "Having some water," he says, "should not be a dangerous and emotional undertaking."

"The fact that we don't fit into the height binary proves it is nothing but a social construct," Tannenwald argues. "Let us abolish these normative height distinctions once and for all!"

Tannenwald is not alone in his cry for justice.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Thomas Jundt, who is currently at work on a heighted reading of colonial American history, argues that water fountains have long been a point of socio-political contention. "It is often glazed over in mainstream accounts of American history, but blacks fighting for their civil rights also fought for the rights of those who didn't fit into the height binary. As Malcolm X was rumored to have told a Hispanic friend, 'We are fighting for your rights, too.' And I think it is not insignificant, in our reading of this, to note that most Hispanics are pretty regularly heighted people. Seriously, how many tall Mexicans do you know?"

Normally proportioned Sadie Greenberg '10 laid out her group's aims. "We don't want to make every fountain height-neutral, we just want that height-neutral option. And they wouldn't be utilized by medium-height individuals alone - they'd be used by everyone who thinks that medium-height people count as human beings."

Continued...

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