There’s nothing like a sweet gift to make a newcomer feel welcome. That’s why Boston University President Robert Brown should feel lucky to be receiving that most fantastic of student gifts: 50,000 hours of community service! Oh, it’s the gift that keeps on giving! Well, we here at the ‘ol Free Press want to do our part. So here’s our contribution to Brown’s belated Christmas present:

l 5 hours: Stand guard outside Brown’s lawn, fertilizer and darts in hand, to ward off all pesky protesters.

l 12 hours: Build a house out of unusable eighth edition Spanish textbooks for our friend outside the College of Arts and Sciences building. He’ll keep warm and be able to conjugate “estar” in no time!

l 6 minutes: Rent The Daily Free Press’s darkroom to College of Engineering students. And not for biomedical engineering purposes …

l 16 minutes: Hand freshman girls over to Massachusetts Institute of Technology frat houses. Here’s a tip, girls: Don’t drink the red stuff.

l 7 hours: Find Uncle Moneybags from Monopoly, swipe his monocle and top hat and hand it to Brown. He already has the money bags.

l 4.5 hours: Delete all content from The Daily Free Press and add 60 crossword puzzles. Maybe a Sudoku or thirty-eight. We’ll call it The Daily Free Puzzle Zone.

l 3 hours: Come to Warren Towers dressed to the gills and brandishing pooper scoopers. Hold your nose, ’cause that pipeline won’t be plugged up for long.

l 1,000 hours per week: Write, edit, take photographs and lay out a 12-page newspaper with a circulation of 9,000 per day and an online hit list of more than 10,000 readers per day. Oh wait, we already do that.