If you’ve been to the third floor of Derthick Hall this year, you probably have noticed a great deal of gray. All the rooms are newly furnished and sporting at least two coats of flat gray paint on their walls. Even the floors are gray and the accents are gray.
When the light shines through the windows, the gray is illuminated and reflected off all the other gray surfaces.
When it’s cloudy outside, the gray clouds visible out the window are indistinguishable from what’s inside the rooms.
It’s all gray. It takes up your whole field of vision.
Derthick is updating. It’s following the path that Webb Hall first sauntered down at the end of last year. One day, all the floors will be new and gray.
Milligan’s charm lies in our patina. Our school is old, our buildings are old, our professors are old. The only thing young about Milligan is the student body. Being old is a testament that you’ve stuck around for a while. Institutions like Milligan are few and far between. You don’t see many people starting up liberal arts schools anymore.
For such a vital building like Derthick, the application of a flat gray paint covers up years of Socratic efforts from students and teachers alike in dingy classrooms with scuffed-up beige paint on the walls. What unites us here is our unspoken pride in the dinginess of the buildings where we conduct our classes.
While, at the end of the day, it is just paint, it represents a larger shifting of normalcy at Milligan. Within the span of four years, we’ve gotten a new president, new coaches, countless new features on campus and, next year, a brand-new interior to the iconically dingy Webb Hall. And now we will have a new, gray Derthick Hall to match.
Much more will change, and a majority of it I will not be a student here to witness or write about. What I do know is that Derthick will be gray, and maybe one day in the far future, they’ll decide to paint over the gray, and someone else will notice it and write about it, too.
Photo: Hallway of the third floor in Derthick (Provided by Danielle Roberts)
By: Griffin McAlister
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