Here’s what Whittier College looks like this time of year.

I confess I avoided a handful of passers-by in taking these photographs, but the sense of momentary social emptiness is very real nevertheless, as if emptiness was one moment at the far end of a swinging pendulum of social motion.

I have a bunch of photographs of university quads to look at here, and some more recent articles from the U.S. context to think about, but to start off this new set of posts I wanted to begin with this extract from a History of the University in Europe. It offers a very suggestive picture of how universities began to acquire real estate in the first place:

“In the late Middle Ages, as student populations grew and universities ceased to migrate, universities acquired buildings and movable property. For a long time time in Paris and Bologna the administration had not needed to take care of buildings, because there were none. Lectures were held in houses rented by the masters, examinations and meetings in churches and convents. In Paris, however, both the theological faculty and the nations began renting property as early as the fourteenth century, and acquiring it in the fifteenth century. With lecture halls in the rue de Fouarre and many other places, with colleges and lodgings, and with churches (all of them on the left bank of the river), the Quartier Latin became the university quarter of Paris. The young Bologna studium, too, contented itself with private houses and religious or public buildings for lectures, meetings, and ceremonies.

Growing numbers of students, some of them very young and needy, made housing facilities more necessary as time passed. College buildings arose everywhere, but especially in universities with large faculties of arts, such as Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and later on the German universities. Italian studia also looked for lodgings for their students. The comparatively few colleges in northern Italy were founded in and after the fourteenth century, at first in converted private homes. After 1420 a special type of building appeared, the domus sapientiae (house of wisdom) or sapienza, a teaching college modelled on the Collegio de Spagna in Bologna, built in 1365-7. The rooms were grouped around an arcaded courtyard. Gradually the sapienza ceased to be dwellings and in early modern times became the official university buildings with lecture rooms, discussion rooms, a library, rooms for accommodation and administration, archives, and a graduation room. The palazzo della sapienza became the current name for these sumptuous university buildings. (136-7)

[It goes on to describe 14th-century quadrangles built at Oxford and Cambridge, funded by donations and university funds.]

… By 1500 old and new universities alike possessed proper academic buildings — lecture rooms, assembly rooms, a chapel, one or more libraries, lodgings for students and teachers – and many articles of value. Throughout Europe, faculty buildings, and particularly college buildings with libraries combining functional needs with a show of magnificence, were visible signs that the masters in the late medieval university were no longer footloose. No longer could universities threaten to migrate, no longer could public authorities tolerate strikes or secessions; the monumental disposition and architecture of the late medieval university showed how completely it had become a part of society. University towns had acquired a character of their own. (139)

The back story here is that the early medieval universities (composed after all mainly of a bunch of masters teaching in rented rooms) were capable of wholesale mobility. If the local authorities ceased to be congenial, scholars could threaten to leave town, taking the university with them. (As in Bologna in 1211-20 or Prague in 1409; the former was only a threat, the latter involved doctrinal dissenters leaving to found a new university in Leipzig.) The acquisition of campus real estate spelled the end of this mobility and thus the loss of a major political option. Not that I really know anything about medieval society, but I imagine this moment as being the end of the powerful rootlessness that American hobos celebrated in song.

At any rate, acquiring real estate obviously had logistical advantages. We see in this passage that there was a real need for student housing and classroom space, and later libraries, offices, and so on. Universities entered into a regime of private property and ownership. And, the last paragraph tells us here, these buildings came to confer social legitimacy, “combining functional needs with a show of magnificence” that must have been equally a show of significance. The overly schematic reading of this passage would be that early universities acquired social legitimacy in the moment of their entrance into regimes of conspicuous consumption of private property.

It’s overly schematic because, even without really knowing the historical or institutional detail, it’s obvious that there were more complicated forms of political recognition at work; a quick glance at the book reminds us that there were real political tensions between kings, local authorities, the Pope, the local Church authorities, the local townspeople… social recognition of universities in such circumstances was obviously not one-dimensional. Nonetheless, the basic link between property and legitimacy seems clear. Such a link appears self-reinforcing: the more a university is legitimate, the more it can acquire property; and the more property it has, the more legitimate it is. It’s no coincidence that the richest universities today are the wealthiest; Thorstein Veblen noted a hundred years ago that money confers prestige. It’s interesting to note, however, that according to the passage above, functionality came first in the acquisition of campus real estate, while the ostentatious magnificence of the buildings came second. As if social distinction was patterned first of all on functional utility? That seems somehow a very American notion.

At any rate, even today university mobility is not entirely dead, even in spite of the long-strengthening equation between universities and their physical presence, i.e., their campuses, i.e., their property. One of my fieldsites, the University of Paris-8, was forced to move to a new campus at the hands of a hostile government in the early 80s. (I won’t get into the story just now.) This year, an American case is very interesting: Antioch College in Ohio was closed by a hostile board of trustees, but in an itinerant fashion worthy of the Middle Ages, some of its faculty moved into new makeshift lodgings, kept teaching, and lobbied to be given back their campus buildings. They had to change their name, because apparently they had no legal right to the old one, and are now the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute. There are a lot of documents online about the closing, but it sounds like there might be a new college opening before long, after a great deal of struggle by alumni. Hearing a presentation about this last spring, I had the sense that these Antioch activists were themselves deeply attached to the physical space of their prior campus buildings. Paradoxically, then, even as they demonstrated that actually a university can detach from its real estate even now, their desire for their lost physical premises evinced something of an ideological attachment to the historically emergent equation of a university with its physical place.

I won’t get further into the details. I’ll just note for now that the birth of university real estate was the prerequisite for the enclosure of university space and the making of what’s now considered (in America) the college quad. More historical fragments of this political history in future posts.

At times, the mold approaches the complexity of mountaintop lichens, or perhaps it’s more like a spontaneous display of abstract art.

At any rate, I’m taking the liberty of reposting the photos here with English translation, because I don’t think it would have much impact just to give the translation without the images. Obviously, the images belong to their photographers, who unfortunately remain anonymous.

The photos that follow are the result of a photography contest organized at a university in the south of France, calling on students to testify about their working conditions.

Thus here you have the daily life of the students at this university. Some basic rules of survival impose themselves.

Rule number 1: Never hug the walls.

[It is dangerous to approach the foot of these buildings.]

Rule number 2: To enter a classroom takes courage.

… but the light is at the end of the corridor.

Rule number 3: Once in class, try to abstract from the environment and concentrate solely on the teacher.

Rule number 4: Expect to bring warm clothes in winter.

Rule number 5: The toilets are at the bottom of the stairs. Don’t go there unless you absolutely need to, and even then not without psychological preparations.

Rule number 6: If the atmosphere is too oppressive, don’t hesitate to get some air on a terrace…

… sit down at a cafe for a while…

… or play sports for a bit.

Rule number 7: Make sure to locate the emergency exits.

[i.e.: For safety reasons, the emergency exit is closed.]

In this context one would like to be able to believe the statements of our leaders:

Nicolas Sarkozy (speech of Jan 22, 2009)
“Higher education, research and innovation are our absolute priority.”
“I firmly believe that the universities should benefit from full ownership of their heritage.” Thanks!

Valérie Pécresse (from http://premierministre.gouv.fr)
“The year 2009 is distinguished by an unprecedented raise in the university budgets: every one of them is seeing its budget rise by at least ten percent.”
“The universities have seen a 43% rise in their safety budgets compared to 2008.”

However in this university:

The budget has risen less than inflation in 2009 while the university has assumed new costs within the framework of university autonomy.

Seven lines for technical and administrative jobs will be cut in 2009.

To continue thinking a bit about the visual culture of French universities, we have here a particularly interesting metacommentary on the physical environment, because it’s so clear here that the conditions of the buildings are a major concern for the locals. The unstated prerequisite of this commentary is approximately: “our buildings are falling apart and that is outrageous.” But here the sarcastic tone serves to re-emphasize the condemnation of the physical environment’s decrepitude, and in passing, at the end, to further condemn the Sarkozy government’s treatment of universities. Towards this end, the decrepit bathroom sink becomes a political signifier. The ludicrous signs – the emergency exit “closed for safety reasons” – are recontextualized as products of the government’s apparent political hypocrisy.

Oddly, there are almost no people in these photographs – the most we see is a long finger that apparently has just wiped some dust off a radiator, a photographer’s sneaker in the bottom of a frame. It’s as if the universities were abandoned as well as decrepit. I won’t pretend that I’m not a little shocked myself when I see this degree of physical decay, especially in comparison to the ostentatiously pristine environment of wealthy American universities, but it’s nonetheless interesting to trace how the built environment erupts into local political consciousness. If the decay of these buildings is recognized locally as a scandal, as an exception to the norms of academic space, then this seems to pose the inverse question as to what kinds of academic space are unmarked and pass as normal, acceptable. Does it have to be the traditional architecture of the Sorbonne? Or is it just necessary to have academic space without visible signs of decay?

Inside the window is a large bank of cubicles, just like an office, lit from above by an array of fluorescent lights like the grid dangling over a hockey rink. The ceiling rises high up above the cubicles, supported by rows of pillars and exaggerated wooden beams. At the far end of the room, the north end, there is another gothic window. Perhaps it is the twin of the one we are looking in through.

These monumental windows face almost nothing whatsoever. The south window borders on the glum wall of the Social Sciences Research Building; the north one adjoins the south wall of Rosenwald. They are windows onto walls. They admit light but not sky, shadows but not landscapes.

About a hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen commented that this architecture was, in a word, phony, being utterly unsuited to modern academic activity, and architecturally jumbled. It “may suggest reflections on the fitness of housing the quest of truth in an edifice of false pretences,” he said grumpily. Here, the gothic windows conceal the cheap monotony of grey cubicles, managing to be impressive from the outside only on the assumption that no one will see the inside.

But is this nothing but a lie built in stone? It strikes me also that this is wasted space, mundane space, lost space, space that doesn’t live up to the fantasy its premises embody, a sort of sad space, where if you showed up with a fairytale fantasy about the life of the mind you would probably be disappointed (unless you gazed out through the gothic windows happily and ignored the fact that there wasn’t much to see through them). Where you hurry to find your book or your desk, huddle together under the fluorescence, dive into your book… if the gothic architecture offers a fantasy experience too unsatisfying to be really livable, does that mean that you are left even more alone to develop your own daydreams about your surroundings? or does academic space just fade into the background, becoming a precondition of work that you come to ignore?

What a dismal allegory for academic life: monumental windows that open onto almost nothing, displaying only an idle group of cubicles for voyeuristic assessment from the back staircase of the next building. If academic life is gothic, does that mean it has both an element of the fantastic and an element of the horrid?