By Stephen Sears

The process is simple. Now that we know President Richard Freeland plans to resign next year, the university as a whole needs to come together and think very hard.

No, I don’t mean thinking about who will be the next president or how the institution will deal with the transition or any of that nonsense. What I am referencing has implications that will reach far into the university’s future, a time when we will have already taken over all of Huntington Avenue (sorry Wentworth) and erected West Village Q.

The issue of utmost importance is what we will name in honor of our soon-to-be-departed president.

You see, all of Freeland’s predecessors have a building on campus named after them. The first president was Frank Palmer Speare (1898-1940). Perhaps he took a perverted pleasure in torturing freshmen with iron maidens and such, so the school named a freshman dorm after him. (Have fun with your economy triples, class of 2010).

After Speare came Carl Stephens Ell (1940-1959). He was known as “Mr. Northeastern” according to the school’s Web site. That’s lame. So the school rectified this by naming Ell Hall after him. I saw Darrell Hammond call us “Northwes-tern” there and it’s also the place with the Husky statue with a smoothed-down snout that students rub for good luck or influenza. All in all, a neat place.

Asa Knowles (1959-1975) was next. He has the law school building. Then came Kenneth Ryder (1975-1989), the namesake of that out-of-the-way hall that boasts Mondo’s and sprinkling asbestos on the fourth floor. John Curry (1989-1996) obviously has the Curry Boston-Area Loudmouth High School Student Center to his credit.

Enough with the history lesson. We have to get to business. Richard Freeland transformed this place like no other president. He even outlasted 200,000 SGA presidents. The man is like Fidel Castro, for crying out loud. Fittingly, the school owes it to him to have something grand carry his name for decades.

This is not as easy a task as it may seem. If we attach his name to some crap building, it will do him a disservice. What did poor George S. and Ellen Kariotis do to warrant the naming rights to that heaping pile of garbage called Kariotis Hall? Their name will now live in infamy because that is by far the worst classroom building on this campus. We should rename it Stalin Hall, Hussein Hall or Sheffield Hall to make it more appropriate.

We have to be careful that the name fits the building. I’m sure Mr. Behrakis did a lot to get his name on that wonderful new health center/classroom hall, but a more appropriate name should be “Ha! You poor liberal arts majors will never see the inside of this place. Go back to Nightingale, you slime and have fun serving us burgers after graduation” Hall.

Speaking of which, that cluster of decaying brick off Forsyth has about four names. Lake-Holmes-Nightingale-Meserve houses most of the “unimportant” majors, like English and Journalism, and has no sensible floor plan. It does have one thing going for it though, the rat-to-student ratio is a solid 5:1, which was a key element in Northeastern’s rise to 115 in the U.S News and World Report’s annual rankings.

So, again, what do we do? Is it even possible for Northeastern to build anymore buildings? We could just install a site that will house a netherworld of permanent construction and call it the “Freeland Zone.” We have to make sure, however, the jackhammers start gearing up as early as possible to disturb as much sleep as we can. It’s only right.

Now we have a lot of smart students here and if we all put our heads together we can come up with something. I mean, according to Northeastern, the incoming class of freshmen is the smartest, bestest and awesomest class ever! They make me and my ’06 colleagues look like devolved vermin who sleep all day and fling feces at each other all night. (They’d be right about the latter.)

I will make the first suggestion. I understand we the students will most likely have no say in this whatsoever, but we can still make our voices heard. As long as I’ve been here, rumors and reports have circulated that the school will turn the Columbus Lot into a football field. It’s perfect. Imagine Chris Berman calling a game from the “Frozen Astroturf-like surface of Freeland Field.” It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

So that is my two cents. I urge all three of you reading this column to storm whatever office you have to storm and demand a say in the process. We don’t want anyone to think we are apathetic now, do we?

— Stephen Sears can be reached at [email protected]