LORAN SMITH: No bad campuses for campus collector

Even with the plethora of heated rivalries in football, I am happy to confess that I have never met a campus I didn’t like—even those which are not so fond of the Bulldogs. I am a campus collector. I drive out of my way, as I have many times in the past, to set foot on a campus I have often read about but have never seen.

What is particularly neat is to visit a campus where its age exudes charm and feeling. When the students are young and the buildings are old, you have the perfect impetus to find the words to the institution’s alma mater, search for the most historic landmark on campus and sing the lyrics that warms the hearts of the institution’s alumni.

When my alma mater, the University of Georgia, has an open date in the fall, I often head to some campus where there is a rivalry game. I’ve seen Harvard and Yale play at Cambridge. The weekend began with a night at Ye Ole Oyster House, where American heroes like Daniel Webster and John Fitzgerald Kennedy once hung out. Then there was as an early wake up call to take the “T” over to Harvard to browse about the campus. When I walked the Harvard Yard, I immediately concluded that, as pretty as it was, it was no more becoming that the quadrangle on the North Campus at the University of Georgia.

Every campus has something redeeming. The bell from the sunken battleship, the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, on the Arizona campus. The statue of Will Rogers at Texas Tech at Lubbock. The Grove at Ole Miss. Heisman Park at Oklahoma. The statues at West Point; the waters of the Chesapeake Bay lapping against the shore of the Naval Academy campus.

The Olentangy River at Ohio State and the white stallion, Traveler, romping about the Coliseum where the Southern California Trojans play their games. Lake Washington’s embrace of the University of Washington’s campus at Seattle — how refreshing and inspiring.

I’ve been to the Yale campus and am smitten by the traditions of the Eli. Georgia’s early presidents were Yale men. If you go to New Haven, you just have to stop at Mory’s. Book a corner table and sing the Whiffenpoof song even if nobody else does — close your eyes and listen to Mitch Miller’s rendition of the Whiffenpoof lyrics and you feel enlightened and uplifted. Nothing better than browsing the campus at Virginia and reflecting on the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, one of my favorite presidents. What is there not to like about Chapel Hill where bumper stickers proclaim, “If God is not a Tar Heel, why is the sky Carolina blue?”

Recently, there was the notice that the Old College on the Georgia campus is the seventh oldest building on a college campus in the United States. This brick building was, in the beginning, a dormitory for the entire student body and also served as a classroom and the dining hall. It was opened for business in 1806. Sixteen years later, an important building appeared on the campus, and it became known as New College.

Old College, according to Larry Dendy, author of Through the Arch, an illustrated guide to the University of Georgia campus, to build Old College, trustees had to sell enough land to raise $1,200 for the cost of constructing it.

“Josiah Meigs, the University’s second president, brought the blueprints of a building at Yale named Connecticut Hall when he came to Georgia, and UGA’s sturdy, no-fills structure closely resembles that building,” Dendy says of Old College. I often chastise myself for not wandering about the campus — which is within arms’ length — more often. Strolling about North Campus, with Larry Dendy’s book as my guide would be illuminating and heart-warming.

What would be fitting would be to show up at the Varsity, late morning, order a couple of chill dogs and a frosted orange — then picnic at Herty Field, where Georgia hosted Mercer in its first football game in 1892.

To love a campus is to know it.