UAlbany Class of 2014: The Old Fountain & The New

Here’s something unique about the UAlbany Class of 2014 experience. The old fountain was still operating in your freshman year, then it turned off for major reconstruction for two years when you were sophomores and juniors, and came back – differently – just in time for you to graduate. So many of you posted graduation pictures at (or in) the new UAlbany fountain.

What’s the message? Or to paraphrase Passover: “What makes this fountain different?”

First of all, about fountains in general. It’s more than just pretty water shooting upwards. Fountains represent the gushing forth of inner reservoirs, our innermost passions and core ideals surging to the surface and out into the open. Its the refreshing release of inner drive and willpower and our deepest beliefs. In the Talmud, a wellspring is considered to be water that is connected to its source, and Chassidic thought is often described using wellsprings as a metaphor.

The old fountain was constant and static. For the months of the year that it was on, it gushed the same levels of water every day, and it always looked the same. And while students did frolic in there at times, especially in the old “Fountain Day” days, it wasn’t designed for people to be walking through it.

The new fountain is variable, it changes in height and strength, and has options for different colored lighting. It is designed for people to be a part of the experience.

This change experienced by the Class of 2014 can perhaps be symbolic of the college experience. What will propel you through life is usually not what you learned at college. Your primary motivators will be what you had inside at age 6 or 14. But you couldn’t regulate or harness that, it was too deep, too vague, too raw. Hopefully, in these formative, maturing years at college you learned to take control of impulse, harness inner energy, make all that passion work for you in everyday life. The academic nuance, anaytical thinking, and social interaction with peers in an independent setting can hopefully channel and direct your dreams and ambitions, desires and hopes.

My principal in Yeshiva days turned around a loose instituition and tightened things up and built it a reputation. He would say this jokingly, “I got a jungle and turned it into a zoo. I hope to get it to run like a circus.”

So yes, the fountain is back. But it’s not the same. The new fountain is also a fountain, it comes from within, it surges upward; but it can dance, it can change, it’s controllable. And it allows us in.