What do the edges of campus look like?

Still not very happy with thinking about the edges of campus either as abject or as sublime, as I discussed the other day. Took some photographs to examine more closely, again of UConn, just past dawn, the day before Thanksgiving.

A parking lot is this university’s border zone. One arrives on campus at the moment when one parks and disembarks from one’s car. But the parking lot itself has edges: trees start where the empty parking lot stops.

The day before thanksgiving is beyond the temporal edges of the academic calendar, off in the shadows of time not regimented by bureaucratic schedules, and even the spatial center of campus is empty at such a moment.

This was a more pastoral scene before the university let its provost build that flashy house on its land. The new president, Michael Hogan, now leases the place for $4000 a month. As if the president’s house were the point of contact between university pasture and the forest.

The road leaves campus, running out into the suburbanized countryside. A delivery truck trundles along.

The arches of the barn leap beneath the blue knees of a hilly morning.

Angularity of the gables clashes with the brown spray of the brush. Campus is surrounded by forests and covered by trees.

Farm-industrial complex nestled in the landscape. Grass almost frosted.

A vast, desolate, well-kept lawn is a conspicuous, extravagant waste of space and money, and therefore essential to the prestige of any reputable university. But it’s also as if it were essential to have non-academic space in the heart of academic space.

Campus boundaries suddenly become concrete. Or rather iron. And spiky.

But on the other side of the street, the campus road is bordered by an empty and humble stretch of woods, the ground covered with leaves.

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?