APRIL FOOL’S: This article was published as part of The News-Letter’s annual April Fool’s edition, an attempt at adding some humor to a newspaper that is normally very serious about its reporting.
After over 40 years of affiliation, students at the Peabody Institute have successfully petitioned to dissociate from Hopkins. Beginning April 15, Peabody will no longer be considered a division under Hopkins and will instead return to its former status of being a knockoff Juilliard School with a pretty library.
The petition leading up to this decision garnered signatures from the entire student body, composed of a whopping 57 Peabody undergraduate and graduate students and including the eight rats currently residing in the cafeteria.
After The News-Letter asked students about their reasons backing this decision, many students announced that they would rather be considered “first-class citizens” at a school with zero funds than “second-class citizens” anywhere else.
In an interview with The News-Letter, sophomore Soft Jazz Trumpet/Music for New Media/Guitar Choir Conductor triple major Timothée Ballet asserted that none of the $150 million in donations from Michael Bloomberg has been devoted to improving the facilities of the oldest U.S. conservatory.
“I just wish we had some of Daddy Bloomberg’s money to renovate our practice rooms so we don’t automatically feel like failures every time we walk in,” he said. “I hear someone crying over a broken piano every two seconds through the crumbling walls and it really kills the vibe, you know?”
Fellow sophomore and classical rock cymbolist Leah Leppelin echoed this sentiment and voiced her concerns on the quality of food in the Peabody cafeteria.
“It would be really nice if we got some edible food here. I am pretty sure our mystery meat is just some of the rats they finally caught in the kitchen,” she said in an interview with The News-Letter.
Other students have also mentioned the dissonance between students at Homewood Campus and students at Peabody. Many Peabody students claimed that Homewood students look down upon them and treat them as, once again, “second-class citizens.”
Freshman ballet/hip-hop fusionist Jaxon Jackson shared one such experience in an interview with The News-Letter.
“I went to a frat party once to let loose, and three pre-meds cornered me and asked what I plan to do with a dance degree. They then left me to go to ‘late night’ at some club called ‘Brody’? I am still confused where that is,” Jackson said.
In terms of the Homewood response to the dissociation of Peabody from Hopkins, many Homewood students declared they did not even realize Peabody actually existed. For most Homewood students, they have barely trekked outside Charles Village in fear they may actually meet someone not completely depressed and stressed out.
Senior Biomedical Engineering/Computer Science/Molecular and Cellular Biology/Neuroscience quadruple major Atif Baslam shared his confusion over the existence of Peabody students in an interview with The News-Letter.
“I didn’t even realize there were people here who studied things they actually liked. I thought we all agreed to sell our souls to the Brody Learning Commons as soon as we got here,” he said.
However, some Homewood students have protested to keep the Peabody Library, despite the fact that the majority of the student body have yet to make it to the JHMI stop to even go see it. These students have started a counter petition to keep Peabody as a Hopkins institution, as “most of [them] only came to this school for that library.”
The remaining major conflict left is the decision regarding where to place double-degree students. To resolve this, University President Ronald J. Daniels and Peabody dean Indie Pendschool have formally agreed to play rock, paper, scissors over each double-degree student on Thursday, April 7 at Penn Station, the midpoint between both institutions.
When asked for a final comment, both leaders posted a joint announcement on Sidechat explaining the mutual amiability of their “break up.”
“We both deserve to be happy and we just can’t find that with each other,” they wrote.
