This is the eastbound bus stop at Garfield. Dozens and dozens of university students come through here mornings, getting off the red line, waiting to go to campus. It’s one of those places where there is interracial coexistence without much real human contact. Pretty much all the white people here are university students. The university is set in a white enclave in an overwhelmingly black part of the city. There’s still a real degree of anxiety about race, or maybe it’s about class difference, or about both at once, inseparably. I’ve met white students who say they’re afraid to come here at night, not for any articulated reason, just out of an ingrained sense of “danger.”

This too is a border zone of the university, though not one where you can see a physical boundary. But I like this photo because some of the social barriers are written on the faces of the two people who ended up in front of my lens. The lady just looks out into the street, indifferent, sort of peaceful. The guy glares at me, his eyebrows creased, his mouth jagged, his head off axis. He hated me, I felt at the moment when I clicked the shutter, but just then the bus showed up and we went off in opposite directions.

It’s a place where strangers have different ways of remaining strangers to each other, of remaining separate from each other, of defending themselves against their fantasies of other people. Sometimes there are people who want cigarettes or directions. In warmer weather, people read academic texts while leaning on the edge of the bridge. There’s a perpetual howl from the highway and subway that run below. The edge of the university stretches off into the abyss of the road.

Campus borders are not homogeneous. They can take shape as an iron fence, a fork in a road, a pasture’s edge, an asphalt lot. Sometimes there really is no border at all, just a progression from the campus center to the outskirts to the countryside. Yet the university, or this university at least, thoroughly undoes the usual progression between the city and the wild. All of a sudden, surrounded by trees, practically without outskirts, industrial buildings rise up; apartment towers and and sports stadiums appear in the middle of nowhere; the clutter of fallen leaves is replaced by a grid of brick pathways. The rural university is an anomaly in the landscape, small and insignificant between the hilltops but still sprawling, sucking the local rivers dry and polluting the groundwater.

The spatial and temporal boundaries of campus overlap oddly. That day before Thanksgiving, for example, the center of campus was quite vacant, while the outskirts had a fair number of middle-aged people walking their dogs – or just walking themselves. The center of campus is itself spatially differentiated and bounded in all sorts of ways: organized by landscape architects into walkways and driveways, lawns and fences; carefully labeled and mapped and lit (at night) in orange sodium; vertically stratified, with the library looking down on the computer science building, which in turn looks down on the adjacent business school; in short, aesthetically and functionally differentiated.

Edges within edges, exteriors within interiors within exteriors, illogical leaps between different borders, fences that protect nothing. The landscape of the university’s borders is partly a document of the history of the university – that agriculture school, for instance, is a relic in a state with not much agriculture any more. And all those forests around the university, running out to the horizon in blue, have grown back since the decline of agriculture in Connecticut. Once, according to folk history, almost the whole state was bare of trees. So the forests at the edge of the university’s fields are a symbol of the disappearance of the farms that that university used to serve.

The social borders of the university are nicely symbolized by its physical arrangements. That parking lot? A good sign that most of the student have cars. That most of them come from families that can afford cars. Those little roads, running over the hills and through the fields? They run off into the countryside where most of the faculty live, in their faux colonials with their children. Marking the meager barrier between town and university. It’s radically different to enter campus through a quiet back road than to enter by the state highway, through commercial strips and traffic howls.

The politics of the university are apparent in its borders too: in the fences that keep the unauthorized from entering the playing fields and the horse fields; in the presidential houses at the campus margins that are overpriced and out of place, paid for by taxpayers in the hopes of housing receptions for prospective donors; in the way the university uses its land. There’s a good question for a land-grant university: what is its relationship to the land?