At sunrise, even the droll ornamental lakes of the university acquire a certain glimmer. The pond weeds become shadows. The shadows wash over the shores of the lake and hide them, which is much for the better, as this lake is populated by geese who have draped the banks with their droppings, each one about the size of a skinned baby carrot. They number in the thousands. Consequently, the mirrored sheen of this fake pond offers only a very incomplete simulation of a beautiful natural scene.

But it isn’t only the artificial lakes that reflect the sky in the morning, it is also the dewy roofs and hoods of parked cars. The staff comes to work early, even the day before Thanksgiving; I suppose many must go straight in to their labs and offices without looking south to the sky. The sun essentially rises in the south in November. The sun rises in the south and careens through the clouds smashing them into small bits and layers only to fall down on the ground without being noticed.

The university is full of things that no one sees. The university is full of rhythms and patterns that serve no purpose and produce no socially recognized effects. That’s an important thing about universities, and it goes for other forms of life too: that as material, sensory, aesthetic and meaningful phenomena, they overwhelm and exceed their designs and their functions. The academic year is littered with gaudy dawns that the college students sleep through, lawns not sat on, trees lying dormant, empty space. I know a professor who has three offices and who also spends half the year abroad. Once I saw a science laboratory down in the basement of the Enrico Fermi Institute, still full of massive dusty equipment and abandoned notebooks, doors plastered with X-Ray Hazard signs, a triplet of dirty wine glasses and a bottle as if the place had been abandoned the very minute that the last scientists finished celebrating their last experiment. The university is full of empty rooms and ignored landscapes. Though the significance of this fact remains to be, well, seen.

The University of Connecticut campus map is in the foreground. It shows a view of campus from above, one which naturally does not include the sky and barely includes the landscape. The campus map is, we might observe, one of the most public forms of the university’s representation of itself, urgently needed by visitors but generally irrelevant to the natives. It has a double purpose: to help people find their way to a given campus building and then back to their cars, but also to serve as a stylized indexical icon of the campus as a whole. A few clumps of trees are drawn in; the flagpoles are sketched; the clutter of sidewalks is shown, and so are the roofs and colors of the buildings. This aesthetic detail, however, seems to be plainly secondary to the map’s primary function of giving a spatial guide to the arrangement of campus buildings.

Can we say then in general that the aesthetic dimension of a university campus — meaning its potential to be experienced as an artwork, as a landscape, as a pastoral scene of a lake and geese, as the shocked instant of a stained dawn, as pure form and contrast and color and scene — that this aesthetic dimension is partly subordinated to functional ends, partly constructed for functional ends, and partly unintentional and beyond all function? After all, campus architects planned to have their fake lakes, and this ornament is hence at least imagined as functional in producing institutional distinction; and to some extent they feel free to destroy these lakes when, say, a vast new chemistry building or parking lot is needed; and to some extent, well, the trees would have grown up and the clouds would have blown over in the early morning whether or not there was even a university here.

The skyline of a campus is different when it’s obscured by the trudging stalks of its scrub plants.

The university can so easily be made to become a tipsy line drawing mauled by the shadows of leaves and stalks.

Does that mean that we could hope to dig past the complex inner workings of academic cultures to uncover their aesthetic surfaces, as purely superficial, trivial, unpredictable visual experiences?

So often the public parts of academic space are either purely functional, or else over-designed by people with a crude and ritualistic sense of style. We get bare heating ducts or else we get marble pillars, fountains and hyperbolic flower arrangements. But what about the little aesthetic accidents, the roofs through weeds, the window on nothing, the long gallop of a chainlink fence pierced by a gate?

I suppose the first thing to say about visual analysis of academic culture is that the architects’ and bureaucrats’ intentions must diverge wildly both from the space as it is actually built, and from the varying visual experiences of the space that different people have. And the slow look of an analyst has little in common with the glance of a busy professor. (Probably it has more in common with the eye of a bored student studying the lecture hall ceiling.)

If you look at the campus from a certain point of view, your camera down in the dirt, the clear lines of roofs and windows are obscured by huge and dark shapes.

Weeds have a skyline too. The whole aesthetic structure of academic space is overturned if you lie on the ground and look out from there. The weeds look higher than the tallest chimney. They are blurry, hard to bring in focus, almost dizzying.

it’s summer in this picture. i was on top of a hill when i took this. i was 18. just before i left for college. the year 2000.

the rows of graves run down the hill to the high brick buildings. the silver dome of the basketball stadium rises like a silly saucer. the trees were the dark green of summer. it was probably hot out.

it’s a little eerie that the view of the university leads down out of a hill of graves. this is the university of connecticut; they have the same thing at cornell university too. a campus graveyard. just a place for the bodies to go when they’re done working, i guess. a convenience, just like the campus coffeeshop. why leave campus when all the amenities are close at hand?

or maybe it’s an allegory of academic death. down in the valley is the campus; up on the hill are the dead, watching over it all. it fits perfectly with that trope of the “dead wood” among the professoriate, a stock image of the old, decrepit and unproductive faculty weighing down on the young and lively.

it was quiet up in that graveyard; no one much liked going there. some people say universities are logocentric, are all talk, but how do they explain the symbolic significance of academic space dedicated to silence, to emptiness, to unproductivity?

down there in the valley of campus buildings i took another picture. it was a sardonic piece of graffiti.

One of the ways universities organize their peaks is with built objects that rise higher than others, that rise for the sake of rising, because height is symbolically potent: a church, a gilded library cupola, a smokestack, a triplet of water towers, a triplet of flagpoles.

Two opposed types of structures reach skyward on this campus (again the University of Connecticut): the most ritualized and symbolic rise beside the most utilitarian and nameless. On one hand, the steeple of the Storrs Congregational Church, the flags of Connecticut and the U.S.A. and the university, and the cupola of the Wilbur Cross Library. On the other hand, the radio tower, the water towers and the smokestacks. The sky simultaneously represents the heights towards which the most sacred buildings reach, and the dumping ground for the exhaust from the campus heating plant. The university as factory collides with the university as temple. (Of course, the more utilitarian, industrial towers and smokestacks are far taller than the merely symbolically tall flags and cupolas – twice as high, at least. But this physical fact may not be very symbolically significant.)

According to Mary LeCron Foster, a symbolic anthropologist writing before I was born, the line and what she calls “lineality” are key cultural symbols of white America, and “up” the preferred cultural direction:

Our skyscrapers, jet planes, and spaceships all attest to the fact that the preferred line is up. We move “up” in our professions or “go to the top” of the class or the organization. It seems no accident that we are “up” from the ape since this is construed as progress, nor that history moves “down” to the present if no particular progress is implied. To the extent that we are future oriented we are also ahistorical, tending to forget events that happened earlier than yesterday. As “up” is good so “down” is bad. To be “down” is to be “out.” “Low” character contrasts with “high” moral worth.

Universities are indeed “up,” or at least are at the top of a number of our prestige hierarchies: they’re reckoned more advanced than secondary or primary education, more pure than technical schools, more comprehensive than colleges, more free in their intellectual inquiry and critical reach than other fora – one could go on with these cultural associations (not that I endorse them), or perhaps just note that it is, after all, called “higher” education.

Yet oddly enough, the campus buildings that most reach skyward, in their architecture, are the most traditional: the church and the library. The physically largest academic buildings, on the other hand, do tend to be the most futuristic, and the most recently built: the vast laboratories built for the sciences and engineering schools, the business school, the sports stadium. But although these modern buildings may be tall, they seldom face up.

To find a modern structure that symbolically appeals to the sky we have to look elsewhere: to the blue emergency phone, built in a little tower, capped with a little cupola of its own, reminiscent of a police siren. It appears to be at once sacred and utterly pragmatic: it promises immediate police assistance while serving as a symbol of protection against the forces of chaos, criminality, threat, fear, rape, robbery, drunken mayhem, and other evils that spread across the campus grounds, especially at night. Its color, blue, symbolizes the police, but the sky too, as if the emergency phone offered rescue “out of the blue,” from above.