The ice-creamification of campus started as a flurry of demanding posts on Sidechat, the popular anonymous social platform. Josiah’s, a student dining option at Power Street’s Gregorian Quad, served sundaes late into the night; why not milkshakes?
Talib Reddick ’26, who as Undergraduate Council of Students chair of campus life had helped bring the sundaes to Jo’s, told the Brown Daily Herald that he “decided to take on the challenge,” running for UCS v.p. on a platform that included the creamy beverages. He won and worked with Dining Services to make it happen.
What nobody anticipated was that this change would mean that all of Brown’s food options would soon blend together, in milkshake fashion, into a marriage of dairy and sugar. Ice cream became inescapable.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t all of the food at Brown. But there was such an influx in sugary, milky options around campus that students began to talk about it. Already the Verney-Woolley and the Sharpe Refectory offered tried and true self-serve soft-serve options: chocolate, vanilla, and twist. So when Jo’s introduced their milkshake station on April 2, which offered expanded flavor options (strawberry!), students were ecstatic.
Things got meltier later that month, when the Blue Room spontaneously offered a “coffee float” station. Then Andrews introduced a sundae station. One day the Ratty also took to offering a sporadic, expanded ice-cream wing.
The ice-creamification of Brown started to polarize the campus on Sidechat: You were either a sweet sympathizer or outraged. One meme with around 1,400 upvotes (about 20 percent of the student body) proclaimed, on the day the fourth dining hall took a dip in the dessert side: “At Brown University they do not let you eat meat or salad… there is only ice cream for food.”
Some played defense: “just imagining the dining hall staff getting so excited about their coffee float idea and then everyone hating it” got about 500 upvotes, reminding students to have gratitude for the offer of sweet escape.
At least it wasn’t a full-blown finals food fight.
