Meet Gus Leal, Dean of BU’s Forgotten School of Plumbing

Deep Underneath CAS—Running water is a luxury that most students take for granted, yet few know the unsung heroes of BU who provides it. Enter Gus Leal, Dean of The School of Plumbing.“Yeah, I’ve been down here for years,” said Gus. “I only take the best and the brightest. Not many people know that this is the most selective school at BU.”Class sizes run about 2 to 5 students, and sick days are not allowed. Gus personally teaches every class, while still responding to every emergency that pings his beeper.“He’ll check his beeper and just rush out of class sometimes. One time he checked it, looked up at us and just whispered ‘Warren’ before dashing out the door. He’s so dedicated” said Suzy Harrison (SP ’19).Every year, Gus awards one student the Golden Plunger, the highest award that a plumbing student can earn. He earned it himself as a sophomore, after dealing with a mess too nasty and unfortunate for non-plumber ears to hear, according to Gus, aside from the fact that it included a hundred rubber ducks and a lot of egg. He refused to provide more details about the incident.According to him, “the name of the game is discretion and stealth.”Interestingly, the School of Plumbing has the most diverse racial demographics and most equal gender distribution of any school at BU.“There’s no discrimination when it comes to plunging,” said Gus. “That toilet may not know black from white, woman from man, but it does know Number 1 from Number 2.”Leal hopes to raise awareness about the school in the coming year in order to increase application rates. His typical routine is to visit high schools, but his only consistent accomplishment there is performing maintenance on their pipes.At press time, Leal bragged about BU’s sturdy pipe system and how his new gloves had no traces of human excrement on them.