On the most recent episode of Campus Trap, David and I talked about whether the archetypal college campus is neither a pure workplace nor a domestic space, but a “third place,” exemplifying—and often containing—the kind of densely elaborated, multi-use human environments (parks, gardens, libraries, community centers, galleries, ball fields, cafés, bowling alleys, music venues) that the suburbanized, car-beholden, monadic United States doesn’t have nearly enough of.
Thinking back to what we discussed, it’s probably most useful to frame campuses as compact, somewhat artificially convened cities, or maybe as core neighborhoods oriented around walkability, green space, cycling, horticultural ornamentation, tree cover, and dense architectural planning. The groves of Academe. Higher arcadias. Green thought in a green shade, to quote Andrew Marvell.
Truly, for many Americans college is the first time in their life—and maybe the only time—that they live in a compressed, at least quasi-urban space, and they’re thrown into this built environment with thousands of peers who share a provisional class, “student.” It’s impossible to separate this sociocultural vitality from its physical emplacement.
Now, this landscape generalization applies mainly to four-year residential colleges, which are not the only kind of “college experience” in the USA—far from it. Many undergraduates are older than the famed 18-22 bracket. Most attend open-admissions regional schools or community colleges, often while working full-time. A lot of them are parents already. There’s less partying and lounging than you might think. But residential campuses are what I know best as a student and an academic worker, and moreover, they dominate US culture’s vocabulary for imagining and visualizing College.
In their spatial articulation, American campuses of whatever status aspire to be thick, lush, intentional, even thoughtful; this logic pervades the national imaginary as well as its constituent planning practices. They’re places where things are happening, where lots of people live and work together, where a putatively common socio-intellectual mission infuses everything. Campuses are, as a genre, simultaneously lyrical, narrative, and visual. They are multimodal green texts.
Consider what they limit or exclude: vehicle traffic, which tends to be more strictly controlled within a campus than without. “Automotive supremacy,” as the transportation scholar Paris Marx calls it, has less weight here, even if some slow roads criss-cross the area.1 Cars on campus are subject to human needs and uses, not the other way around like it usually is in the USA. Suburbs and freeways are grim parodies of campuses with their walking paths and bike lanes. Those ersatz arcadias are a petroleum nightmare where residents spend most of their time alone behind the wheel or in front of screens.
Academic space comes at a terrible cost, however. It takes a lot of low-wage labor to keep Arcadia arcadian, and the more elite a campus, the more heavily policed, fortified, and surveilled. My home institution, USC, for example, is surrounded by sharp fences. Larger schools have their own security forces, and they’re rolling out new policing technology (facial-recognition, anyone?) all the time. Even worse, as Davarian L. Baldwin demonstrates in In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower (2021), the bigger schools, the names you see on magazine lists (Baldwin calls them “UniverCities”), have baleful extractive relationships with communities around them, often putting militarized gentrification into overdrive.
Yet even this isn’t enough for a lot of people. The modesty of higher ed’s radical energies and its thorough infiltration by capital and the warfare state don’t stop the haters: Plenty of Americans distrust or even despise campuses, looking at these compressed, diverse spaces with paranoia. Too “liberal.” Too noisy and crowded. Too carnivalesque. These are people who own jet-ski dealerships and vote for weird race hustlers like Donald Trump, but it’s also a lot of liberals who read The Atlantic and consider themselves thoughtful pragmatists. Campus, after all, is where those Marxist professors who make your kids change their politics are, teachers with their silly utopian minds2 who just don’t get how the world really works, most of whom probably wish they lived in Brooklyn or Seattle.
I won’t claim that someone who can’t at least appreciate the aesthetics of a good campus is a reactionary who drives too much. Nor would I assert the capacity of Higher Education to change the world for the better by itself. But who knows! It’s a big joint-stock world containing lots of colleges and universities, all of them humming away, with specks here and there writing newsletters.
Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation (New York and London: Verso, 2022), 30.
Even though most professors are liberals, not leftist radicals.