Sad Chairs of Academia

Chairs at colleges take a beating and rarely get replaced. If there’s a shopping list, something else gets a higher priority. Poorly-paid professors are used to getting along with little and keep using old chairs, no matter what shape they’re in. The universality of these conditions inspired the Tumblr blog Sad Chairs of Academia. Here’s a recent post, illustrating the picture above.

This multi-denominational congregation of sad chairs stoically gathered in a former basketball court (which for the past 40 years has been re-purposed as the Art + Design department’s Foundation Drawing Studio) to greet new students this September.  This gang of seats was deemed enough of an embarrassment that the administration sanctioned replacing them all with set of previously decommissioned chairs that were, at least, matching.

See hundreds more chairs with sad existences at the blog. -via Everlasting Blort  


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Going to a Big 10 university, all of my classes were in some sort of lecture hall. Even the high level science classes had at least 30 students: Individual seats, bolted to the floor, no cushions. One of the reasons to own a down jacket.
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This really can depend on the the department and school. I've seen medical school meeting rooms look like they were at some resort, and engineering departments that were furnished like some trendy startup. But I spent most of the time in math and physics buildings with chairs about the same age as myself, with decor that resembles what my parents had as teenagers.
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Reminding me of a class in college at the time girls began wearing short skirts. After the first class, the professor decided that if all the chairs were arranged in a circle, it would facilitate discussion. Before the next class began most of the young men, myself included, got to class early and took up seats on one half of the circle, forcing the girls to sit in the other half. Such dirty young men we were. Next class we got there early only to find the chairs back in their more familiar in line rows. True story.
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