“The famous saudade… is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.”
- Aubrey F.G. Bell, In Portugal, 1912
Years from now, people will take pride in having experienced what will be called “the old McGraw Hall.” The ancient elevator with buttons that didn’t light up, the way the building smelled like stale pipe smoke, the magnificent carved-wood staircase in the main foyer that a handful of professors tried and failed to convince the administration to preserve, the overwhelming feeling of decrepitude that perfectly suited the home of an Ivy League history department. It will all fall into the warm, fuzzy glow of collective memory and into various industrial dumping bins. In the latter years of this century, fauxstalgic undergraduates will wonder why such an ugly renovation was ever allowed to happen in the first place. They won’t remember the scaffolding around the doorways to keep the facade from crashing onto someone’s head, or how one professor came back from teaching remotely during the pandemic to discover the paper-thin crack in her office wall had widened enough to see through.
Despite valid complaints from current faculty and staff of the department about the unfeeling construction plans, this renovation was inevitable. The only question was where to put the history and anthropology departments during the projected three years of construction. The answer runs through the death of a student, the banning of a fraternity, an epidemic of loneliness, and Woodrow Wilson.
“Are you going to the housewarming party for the department?”
“There’s a party?”
“Yeah, today at four. Aren’t you on the email list?”
“There’s an email list?”
I learn about the party completely by chance. Somehow, I, a passionate history major, have slipped through the cracks of the email listserv for history department events, and am completely oblivious that there will be a celebration of the department’s new home in just a few hours.
I finish a day of classes on the Arts Quad and I plug the address into my phone—who has ever heard of Mary Ann Wood Drive?—following the dotted blue line toward the Slope. (Mary Ann Wood is buried next to her husband Ezra Cornell in Sage Chapel, if you were wondering.) It’s the kind of bright late winter day that barely tips over into early spring, and hardy crowds are out on the slope to grimace in the wind and watch the sun sink beneath West Hill. Construction crews lop limbs off the ancient oaks in front of McGraw Hall and load them into truck beds as I pass the chain-link fence surrounding the renovation site. A sign says it’ll be done in spring 2028, the semester I graduate.
The blue dots lead me down the hill into the long, cold shadows of West Campus. The grumble of construction equipment and the chatter of students recedes, replaced by the growing drone of car traffic on Stewart Avenue. The crowd thins out further when I wind down a staircase and past the loading dock of Keeton House. It smells like sewage. The parking lot is bereft of cars in the wane light of late afternoon.
In front of me is the building, plopped anonymously between the back of one building and the back of another. Really? That’s it? The beating heart of campus, the home of my department—easy access to Equity House, Delta Tau Delta, and the Ithaca City Cemetery. Geographically, it’s actually not very far from West Campus or even McGraw Hall itself, but the spiritual distance is vast.
120 Mary Ann Wood Drive is an unremarkable brick-and-glass modernist structure built by Cornell for the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity in 1964, but most famous for what didn’t happen there in 2019.
BILLY STAMMER / COLLEGETOWN
On the Thursday before Parents’ Weekend that October, freshman student Antonio Tsialas attended a dirty rush party at Phi Psi. Antonio got drunker and drunker wandering from room to room. In one, someone poured vodka down his throat. In another, he and the boys dirty-rushing with him had to finish a bottle of vodka between themselves before they could leave. I wonder which history professors now grade papers in those rooms.
It’s not clear exactly what happened to Antonio on that October Thursday night after he left Phi Psi in a drunken haze. What didn’t happen was any kind of help: help for Antonio up the arduous slope back to his dorm. Nobody was with him when he left that night, or willing to admit they were. He didn’t show up to a planned meeting with his mother at the Cornell Store the next day, although the president of Phi Psi, Andrew Scherr, called Antonio’s roommate and told him not to tell anyone that Antonio had been at the dirty rush party that night. (Incidentally, Scherr is now an investment banking analyst in Goldman Sachs’ healthcare division.) Antonio’s body was found in Fall Creek Gorge that Saturday.
In retaliation, the university banned Phi Psi and confiscated the house. The university police department investigated the fraternity’s former members but decided not to press charges. The building lay vacant for five years, and incongruous reminders of its former use are still visible today. A tattered sticker still clings to the porch door. It reads, “Alcohol or drug emergency? Call 911 for help.”
At 4:05 p.m., I walk in the same door Antonio did and sit down at an empty table in the main room. At the other end of the room are clustered a few professors, a covey of eager graduate students, and a huge spread of food from Wegmans. I am the first undergraduate to arrive. They’re overjoyed to see me.
“We were worried nobody would come!”
Awkward laughter. I check my watch.
Being the only one there, I introduce myself and ask the group what they think of the new surroundings. They grimace, sigh, but they’re hopeful. It’s only been three weeks since they moved in.
“What’s changed so far?” I ask.
Fewer students meeting in person, more emails. Less fun, fewer grad students, too. They’re cloistered in carrel desks in Olin Library, mostly, with some of the junior professors. Not enough space down here.
At 4:15 a handful of undergrads peek in, unsure if this is the right spot. There’s no sign on the door yet, although they say one will be installed soon. Eventually, haltingly, the cavernous space starts to come to life. I overhear jokes about the university administration being caught using ChatGPT in their communications with professors, and terse discussion of the Trump administration's cutbacks to research funding. Together, against all odds.
BILLY STAMMER / COLLEGETOWN
The history department is euphoric with the fizz of human connection as I stuff a catered Wegmans seltzer into my pocket and set off unnoticed to explore the building. It’s nothing like any other academic department I’ve seen—but then again, it isn’t really one. The design folds back in on itself, going up and down random sets of stairs and accessing gigantic secret rooms through minute, inconspicuous hallways. The building seems designed to obfuscate and disorient outsiders, a benefit for a fraternity but counterproductive for an office. I look out from a balcony at an even larger room subdivided into cubicles. From the party downstairs, a voice drifts up: “They’ve got to do something with the place.”
Past the rows of bedrooms-cum-offices, I see a piece of paper tacked to the wall. As far as I can tell, it is the only remaining trace of the fraternity still in the building. Of the dozen-odd history professors I talked to for this piece, none of them knew it existed. The paper commemorates, of all people, Brother Woodrow Wilson, who was a visiting lecturer at Cornell during the fall 1886 semester.
The future 28th President of the United States accepted a political economy instructorship at Cornell University. He intended to score a permanent position. Woodrow dined at his fraternity, our New York Alpha of Phi Kappa Psi, then seated at the Gargoyle House on Huestis Avenue in Collegetown [now the site of bop, a Korean food truck]. Sadly, Brother Wilson was not offered a permanent professorship by Cornell President Charles Kendall Adams.
Michael Moore ‘87
Kevin Smith ‘87
Chet Osadchey ‘88
BILLY STAMMER / COLLEGETOWN
These students, baseball pitchers and running backs for the Big Red, took the time to commemorate the single academic year Woodrow Wilson spent at Cornell, a time barely remembered anywhere else. What a shame that a man destined for greatness by way of a Princeton professorship slipped out of this university’s hands by way of a Princeton professorship.
When I come downstairs, one professor is telling some grad students about how a friend of his, who attended Cornell during Phi Psi’s heyday in the 1990s, reacted when he told him the department was moving into their old house. The friend first laughed and told him about an 80-keg party he went to there. Then his friend got serious.
“He said to me, ‘I don’t know how many women you’ll get to come into that building.’” The grad students get quiet.
After this party, I will try personal contacts, scour the internet, and reach out to Cornell students of the time, and find nothing. In the meantime, I wonder aloud what else might have happened here. A professor leans back and clears his throat. He says, “ignorance is bliss. I’d rather not know.”
Across the room, another small group of professors laments how students have changed over the years. The relocation down the hill will only exacerbate how, in the past five to ten years, fewer and fewer undergraduates seem to have a spark, much less an attention span. Office hours sit empty. “I’m losing my favorite part of the job,” an elder professor bemoans. After the temporary disruptions of the pandemic permanently widened the gulf between professor and pupil, there is a sense that the damage of this temporary move will not heal once the scaffolding comes down from McGraw Hall.
My therapist, eighty-one years old, is confused by all this. During our session, he thinks back on his time at the University of Massachusetts. He remembers getting drinks with professors and going to dinner at their houses, eager to discuss in more detail whatever happened in class that day, and get to know them on a personal level. He smiles and tells me he became genuine friends with some of his professors, who gave him advice on his career, friendships, and romantic relationships.
“Haven’t you had anything like that at Cornell?”
Uh, no.
To be clear, this isn’t the professors’ fault, nor is it the fault of students. The slow atrophy of social connection and understanding between teacher and learner is a product of forces far beyond our individual control. We shouldn’t deny personal responsibility when we scroll through class or skip every office hour, but our guilt is collective.
Some of what got us here is left over from the pandemic, and some of what got us here is our phones. Some of it within the history department is the move down the slope to Mary Ann Wood Drive. Maybe some of it will be reversible, but professors and undergraduate students will probably never be as close as they were before all those changes. Learning to live with the loss is just as important as trying to turn it back: after all, we can never fully return.
Students of history have a guilty pleasure. Sometimes, when we think no one else is looking, we sigh wistfully, lean back in our chair, and lament change. “Why did it have to happen?”
“Why did Rome fall?”
“Why did everyone stop reading?”
“Why did Cornell refuse to hire Wilson?”
“Why did the administration put us here?”
“Why did McGraw Hall get ruined?”
“Why did nobody help Antonio?”
“Why have we lost touch with our students?”
"Why doesn’t anyone try any more?”
As I nod goodbye and begin the trek back to the heart of campus, it dawns on me how compelling the temptation is to look back, glaringly for historians. We wallow in saudade: nostalgia for a thing that never was. Will we ever recognize that we can never be satisfied? We are bound and compelled to wonder—to grasp hopelessly back into the past.
Down on Stewart Avenue, the cars roll across the old cobblestones, and do not stop. ⬥