Traditional residential campuses like my own are as close as the nation gets to building utopian communities. Within their leafy quadrangles they house artists, historians, philosophers, physical and social science researchers, wonderful libraries and theaters, and cadres of support staff ready to help anxious undergrads.
A little personal history. I had no idea that the map of my life had been laid out when my parents dropped me off in front of Aylesworth Hall at the edge of the prairie. The year was 1964, when Colorado State University was still proud that the farm animals in the Veterinary School resided at one end of the beautiful Oval. That began an unbroken fifty-four year trek from one public campus to another. To be a teacher is also to be a student. The roles sometimes blend, but they exist in a circumscribed world. To this day I have no idea what it would be like to work in a corporate office. All I know is campuses, students and colleagues. Even so, I count myself lucky that students leave our weekly sessions together usually no worse for the experience. They are (mostly) a pleasure to work with.
Some of my former campuses were small. For a year I taught at what is now the University of Worcester in the English Midlands. The campus was a mix of simple red brick buildings and a few metal quonset huts–all that some public universities could afford, given the spartan budgets of post-war Britain. What the college lacked in amenities was easily made up by a pleasant group of academics who became friends and colleagues. The only sour note was the college’s new “principal,” who could barely abide the yearly arrival of another American exchange professor. Colonial upstarts pained him; it registered on his face as clearly as if you had just driven a car over his foot.
But I digress. I finished my undergraduate years at Cal State at Sacramento, a sprawling collection of blocky buildings surrounded by lush gardens that you would expect at a posh Miami hotel.
All of the five campuses that have been my homes where public universities. And Cal State typified some of their best traits, with faculty interested in teaching (not a given in American universities), students aware that this was their moment to make a better life, and modest fees made possible by the flourishing California system. The early generosity toward higher education in most states was reflected in my tuition, which was sixty-three dollars a semester.
When I moved on to graduate study at the University of Pittsburgh, the good citizens of Pennsylvania paid for living expenses and the much higher tab for tuition. The deal was that I would be a diligent student of rhetoric, and that I would teach some courses in public speaking (not very well, as it turned out). I like to think that I’ve partly repaid the faith shown to a stranger by later giving back to students on another nearby public campus. But the consequences for state-supported campuses will be dire if local governments continue to disinvest in higher education.
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Quimby’s Prairie John Davis
Conventional residential campuses like my own are as close as the nation comes to building utopian communities. Only half of America’s college students have the benefit of these self-contained islands. Even fewer have the advantage of a good liberal arts education. In spaces between their leafy quadrangles they house artists, historians, philosophers, physical and social science researchers, wonderful libraries and theaters, and cadres of support staff for our increasingly anxious undergraduates. Many academic landscapes were designed to be park-like and sheltering, often with quirky results. On my campus “Quimby’s Prairie” is a rich carpet of green grass ringed by neo-Georgian structures, but it is also near another quadrangle called “Green Lawn,” which is mostly a prairie.
Pitt’s Heinz Chapel
Even in cities most campuses even are designed to allow students to exercise their birthright as pedestrians. Cars are usually pushed to the periphery: a physical manifestation of the metaphysical idea of a space for contemplation. A campus is usually a series of “commons” meant to facilitate these frail but vital functions. Nearly every space is a communication platform of one form or another: classrooms, of course, but also theaters and recital halls, restaurants and student centers, seminar rooms, group-work areas in a library, lounges in dorms and academic buildings, picnic groves, benches under old oaks, chapels, offices and purpose-designed spaces for all forms of media. The best campuses unfold as a series of indoor and outdoor “rooms” that encourage direct unmediated communication. It’s a wonderful thing that some progressive cities and tech giants have tried to capture for themselves. But it is easy to overlook what we may be losing.
The idea of constant connectivity trivializes these spaces. Smartphones never leave a student psychically alone.
Changing times mean that these refuges devoted to the exploration of human and natural phenomena must cope with a culture that intrudes in unhelpful ways. There is no question that the frailties and addictions of the larger world need to be visible, but the idea of constant connectivity trivializes these spaces. Smartphones never leave a student psychically alone. Large blocks of space and time were meant to make possible the sequential thinking that reading Aristotle or McLuhan require. Now, those hours are riddled with the temptations of the screen. These days a stroller around any campus will pass too many walkers who are unable to muster a simple greeting because they are on their phone. Their bodies may be in the most stimulating community they may ever know, but their heads are elsewhere.
Recently improved Wifi coverage in my campus building brought a wave of delight that I found hard to share. Rhetoricians trained in oral traditions are naturally sensitive to environmental elements that sabotage attention. You can guess that some of my students occasionally have to sit through admonitions to “live in the moment.” Too few notice what they may be missing the possibilities of their mini-utopia by focusing on digital devices that rob them of their time and peace of mind.
It is an intriguing idea that we have a natural affinity for certain sounds, shapes and forms.
Perhaps you’ve heard the story about the attraction that the pitch of B-flat major has for humans. For years musicians and some scientists have speculated that this single note shows up as the home key in a lot music, as well as other non-musical parts of our lives. Is B-flat our homing frequency? What accounts for all of the major pieces of music written in this key? Is it an accident that a black hole in deep space seems to “sing” that note, albeit some 50-plus octaves below the pitch we know as middle C? Is it more than a coincidence that our electrical system “hums” at 60 hz (cycles per second), close to the audible lower octave B-flat? And should we make anything out of the anecdotal evidence offered by some that human structures seem to sustain sound especially well in the neighborhood of the same pitch?
Actor Ethan Hawke’s interesting documentary Seymour: an Introduction (2014) includes a passionate pianist who is impressed by how many composers were drawn to producing works in the key of B-flat major, including concertos and symphonies by Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Schumann, Prokofiev and others. Is it the perfect note: a kind of passkey that resonates with something inside, as the opening of Brahms Piano Concerto in B flat major.
A slightly broader question was asked by the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in the first of his still fascinating Norton Lectures given at Harvard in the early 70s (available on YouTube). He argued that the idea in linguistics of an “innate grammatical competence” that allows even young children to form sentences may have its counterpart in how we are “tuned” to the intervals that make up tonal music. The idea is that we already “know” a harmonic series like a triad of C, G and E without having to learn it. Any set of notes built off the overtones of a low first note always sounds “right.” We expect a simple musical work to find its way along what music theorists call the “circle of fifths” within a chromatic or diatonic scale.
To be sure, a more specific theory asserting a special affinity for a single absolute pitch has its problems. After all, Mozart’s B-flat was lower than ours. In his time the nearby tuning note of A was more likely to be around 420 hz rather than the more standardized 440 hz today. But it is an intriguing idea that we may have a natural synchronicity to natural sounds, shapes and forms. Think of how easily we associate music composed in a minor key as darker and more solemn. When a tune “resolves” in a major interval it tends to perk us up. We don’t have to be trained to notice the effect. Most of us are born into this world discovering that we have an unquenchable thirst to hear modulations of sound that build out from (and occasionally violate) music’s fixed chromatic intervals.
The motive to confirm a ‘hard-wired’ need is naturally interesting, leaving us at the doorstep of a theory of forms. Consider the rhyme that falls at the end of a second line of a poem; or the AABA structure of a pop song that so easily satisfies our expectations by delivering the “B” refrain; or the third act resolution of conflict that developed and festered in Act II. All are narrative forms that have become routine templates for thought. They sink their claws into us (or were they already there?).
It would might take some magical thinking to identify a form that is as controlling on us as something like the inviolate laws of physics. Even so, the question of identifying perfect resonances–responses tuned to our essences as humans–is intriguing. We are usually better at naming specific human processes than single universals that may function as reliable North Stars. To be sure, religion fills this need for many. But it’s exciting to consider the idea of a physical property that exerts an enigmatic and irresistible pull. If we need a visual reference, perhaps form as “deep structure” is perhaps like the inscrutable black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968). The possibility that anything can be the organizing principle that animates the rest of our world is always exciting.
All of the five campuses that have been my homes where public universities. And Cal State typified some of their best traits, with faculty interested in teaching (not a given in American universities), students aware that this was their moment to make a better life, and modest fees made possible by the flourishing California system. The early generosity toward higher education in most states was reflected in my tuition, which was sixty-three dollars a semester.
