A new tenant enjoys her lunch, outside Buchanan Hall.

Lebanon, NH: For almost 40 years, Buchanan Hall has served not only as low-income housing for many of Tuck’s first year students, but also as a sad monument to a mercifully dead architectural movement known simply (and not coincidentally) as "Brutalism."  This genre, popularized by depressed, post-WWII communist Europeans, is known for its uninspired and repetitive angular geometries mixing wooden forms with base materials – normally rough, unadorned concrete and dark-colored brick.  

Said one former Tuck administrator, “I’m not sure how that ugly piece of shit got approved…the style is patently un-American and it looks more like an East German jail than an Ivy League dormitory.  But hey, it was the 60’s; they were probably just doing a lot of drugs.” 

Four decades of use and abuse by thirty-something business students trying desperately to recapture their youth through nightly keggers have only added to the building’s rapid deterioration.  As a result, rural homeless appear to be increasingly drawn to its familiar smell of stale beer, urine, vomit, and human excrement. 

Just last week, after another late night of statistics homework followed by a rousing beer pong match, Bryan O’Neal (T’08) was ready for a well-deserved 3-hour rest.  When he returned to his Buch room, however, he was greeted by the startled look of a strange, shabbily dressed woman telling him to “get the hell out,” and to “find [his] own box.”  No, Bryan had not wandered into the wrong room; he was just another Tuckie in a growing number of Buchanan residents suffering unpleasant run-ins with local drifters mistaking their dorm for a homeless shelter. 

Displaced Tuckies huddle in Buchanan hallway as homeless sleep in their beds

These incidents have put a great deal of unwanted pressure on an image-conscious administration already reeling from the precipitous fall Tuck took in this year’s Wall Street Journal rankings.  Afraid that evicting Buchanan’s undesirable new tenants will undermine the sterling community reputation the school enjoys from its mandatory one day of service each September, Dean Danos has instead ordered students to let the vagrants have whatever room they claim as their own, especially if they appear to be of Native American descent. 

A Tuck Hall source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, has informed the Profit’s investigative team that the Dean’s concern is not with current students, mostly because “they don’t have votes in the rankings.”  The source says the Dean has instead decided on a passive strategy of neglect, whereby the homeless will hopefully leave the dorm voluntarily once they experience what life is like there.  

All janitorial staff and sanitation workers have been ordered to keep clear of Buchanan, allowing leaky faucets, broken lights, cracked windows and stained carpets to remain as is.  Students still residing in the dorm have not noticed the policy change.