other people's campuses

There's often something very seductive about other people's campuses: one doesn't have to live one's own academic life in them, so plenty of room for imaging them as perfect teaching and working environments, full of enthusiastic blah blah blah.  Because obviously, it only takes a dinner's worth of conversation to make it very very clear that one university is very like another, in so many ways...UNC, though, has some spectacular buildings: the oldest public university, I was told, and the central campus designed by Masons, so the positioning of buildings, the situatedness at various points of the compass, is all with a purpose.  And Art History were great hosts - it was good to let a new incarnation of a Flash! talk get an airing ...