the how and the why, part 4

We’ve talked about formation, readiness, and prescriptive disciplines. Today I want to talk about spaces for learning.

In a New York Times interview, political theorist Wendy Brown addresses some of the uproar about free speech on campus by diagnosing a confusion that comes, in a way, from architecture. Naturally, it caught my eye, and I think her analysis is useful:

“We’re confused today about what campuses are,” says Brown, who is 66 and is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. “We’ve lost track of what’s personal and public and what’s acceptable speech where. That confusion happens in part because boundaries are so blurred everywhere.”

And more specifically:

Campuses are complicated spaces, because they aren’t just one kind of space: There’s the classroom, the dorm, the public space that is the campus. Then there’s what we could call clubs, support centers — identity based or based on social categories or political interests. It’s a terrible mistake to confuse all of these and imagine that the classroom or the public space of the campus is the same as your home.

In architecture, we call the aerial view of a blueprint drawing the plan view: seeing the entirety of a structure from above, with a 2D simulacrum of completion, simplified, each container dedicated for its distinct purposes and labeled as such. I think Brown is right that when many of us invoke the word “campus,” a plan view in the mind’s eye does not distinguish at all. Rather, “campus” registers as one big mass of squares and rectangles and rotundas, all equally devoted to the well-intended mixture of belonging and safety and professional preparation and the life of the mind and recreation — and somehow all adding up to “home away from home” — as one lumped-together design and one united effort.

Campuses should take a closer look at their spaces and sharpen the distinctions of those spaces, even literally in the first-year arrival campus tours. As in: “Here is the dorm, where you share life with others and build friendships based on late-night advice, open-ended loyalty and support, comparing notes in heart-to-hearts.” And “here is your classroom, which is an arena for ideas scrupulously examined right down to the foundations, where you are invited to change your mind — or just try on changing your mind, provisionally — between the opening and closing of the semester.”

Conceptually, these separate functions are self-evident, but in practice, they’re a hopeless muddle. Campuses could solve their wish to be welcoming and approachable to all by making the differences in their spaces more different from one another, and teaching students that their behavior can take cues from the architectural envelope around them. Tell them explicitly: Affinity spaces are for the ease of using shorthand for shared experiences. Classrooms are for finding language for communication across unshared ideas and experiences. The question is not: am I welcome or unwelcome here, on this campus-as-one-mass, as my “true self”? The question is: How will this campus space form the many virtues and habits I need to be free, and how will that space down the quad also do so, but very differently? An ill-conceived appeal to hazy “authenticity” would tell us that all spaces should welcome the same kinds of speech, the same kinds of concerns, the same kinds of relationality. But a more dimensional view of personhood — and the dimensional, specific spaces in which our lives play out — would nourish the multitudes each person contains.

You may be asking whether campuses are really committed to making those distinctions more productively, frictionfully sharp in an era of low viewpoint diversity. As I think alongside my own kids’ exploration of college, I’m looking at the spaces that appear on campus, or perhaps as campuses-within-campus, or perhaps spaces on the periphery of campus, to round out the formation offerings in the contemporary university. Next I’ll list some of the institutions — spaces and programs and curricula — that I’ve got my eye on (some of which might be interesting to my kids, and some not, we’ll see!).

Part 5 is here.