Covid: The Empty Campus

Where non-academics have a resumé, academics have a curriculum vitae (a c.v.), the Latin for “life course.” Like the resumé, the c.v. is structured by time, recording year by year positions, responsibilities, and accomplishments. It is hard, though, not to think of the “course of life” spatially, as a river or a track. For me, as for many academics that course, that river, that thread takes me through a series of campuses.

I almost always feel at home on a university campus, even ones I am visiting for the first time. This does not mean I don’t get lost or disoriented—campuses are often disconcerting jumbles of nameless paths and unlabeled buildings. But when I am on a campus—a residential campus—I feel not so much that I know where I am as that I know who I am. I know that there will be a library, and dorms, and buildings with offices, that there will be students carving their way through green spaces between those locations, that there will be food (bad, good, or indifferent), and that someone somewhere had an idea that this place would be beautiful, even if in this particular instantiation it does not seem beautiful to me. If I am more than fortunate to have received my PhD at a moment when there were some (not so many) jobs to be had, I am doubly fortunate to feel at home not only on my own campus, but on the ones that look and feel just different enough.

I have also been fortunate that all the places I have been a student and a faculty member have been at least pretty. Here is my place-forward c.v., the landmarks on my course of life:   Princeton, The University of Pennsylvania, Brandeis, Tulane (as a visiting professor), and Rice. I started at what has been called “the northernmost southern university”—not always a compliment—and have ended up in the Gulf South, arriving where, as the Harry Nilsson song puts it “the weather suits my clothes.”

When I first went to Princeton on a campus visit before I was admitted, I moved in, using up, I think, all the days that my high school had allotted for college shopping. Before and during my visit, I did no research on requirements, classes, or extracurricular activities, but spent my time wandering the campus into the Princeton Institute woods, drinking in the colors of fall trees, the blue air, and the persistent greenness below my feet. I did not attend football games or go to clubs, although I must have eaten somewhere: I remember that the friend on whose floor I slept had a hotplate and a tiny fridge with cottage cheese in it, which seemed to me the height of sophistication. (Once I went to college for real I never used a hot plate or ate cottage cheese again.) Although in my years at Princeton, I learned to be suspicious of its mythology, spending the last two years at daily protests of the university’s investments in South Africa, and helping to start a women’s studies program and a women’s center,  I never lost the sense of the physical beauty of my surroundings, even as I scurried, half-scared and half excited through the dark campus at night. My four years offered gave me every form of beauty: the lingering autumns of college brochures; the one real winter where Lake Carnegie froze hard enough to skate on and icicles hung from every tree; the resplendent Spring of magnolias and mimosas, and the summers—I always stayed for the summer—of quiet heat.

If Princeton was my first experience of walking, reading, and forming friendships in a beautiful place designed precisely for those activities, Rice, presumably my last campus, is gorgeous in a different way. My curriculum vitae has led me further south than I knew was possible; the magnolias that signified to me, as a college student, the southern-ness of Princeton, have given way to live oaks, heavy with the forms of moss that live in and off them. When I first came across the Rice planning map by the architect Michael Graves (who it turns out, had also designed the toaster I bought at target) I saw in two dimensions what I have long felt, as it were, on the ground. The campus is designed along a central axis that provides vistas through a series of arches from the Sallyport of Rice’s original building at the East end of the campus to the music school near its west End. A walk from end to end propels you through the middle of sequential quads, essentially formal in their layout. The older part of campus, to the south, provides shade and protection from Texas rains. Although there are new and some adventurous buildings, the keynote of the campus is orange brick, beautiful and mellow as the rose-colored brick of eighteenth-century English houses. When the brick escapes campus, as it does in the “Rice architecture” of surrounding neighborhoods, it loses its patina and begins to look, inevitably, like the façade of a motel. Everywhere there are trees and there are tiles, some decorous and geometrical, some crazy with color.

I am well aware that the campuses I have described are empty ones. Students appear only once in my paean to the beauties of campus, as they scurry across green space on the way to class. This does not, I hope, represent my attitude towards students, although, at the end of the year I share tired jokes with my tired colleagues about the relief that the campus is reverting to a library or a spa. In the case of Rice, my reticence is in part a matter of realist description. Rice has very few students, and a huge campus; because of its residential college system, student life takes place elsewhere, in a parallel and equally lovely set of spaces from which, on Friday afternoons, music can be heard. Quads are innocent of familiar campus vignettes: young people sunbathing, reading, making out, playing frisbee.  On a typical day I might see more dogs than students except in the ten minutes between classes when the students reveal themselves in the liminal space between buildings.

This semester, this COVID semester, the emptiness is different and more profound. I have yet to see (one used to say “bump into”) a student that I know. Only 40% of them live on campus; although there are some in-person classes, I do not know how many students regularly attend in the flesh. I see pairs of students, sometimes triplets, from a distance. Not only are they masked, but they move as if in a masque from a 16th-century play: seemingly in costume, ghostlike, one following the other, flickering out of sight as they move off the paths to wherever they are going. Surely, they are allegorical figures, but the allegory is hard to read.  

Rice was perhaps the first university to commit to building temporary but substantial outdoor structures for spread out in-person classes; four white tents, vaguely oriental, rise up behind the students. Like the tents of Victorian travelers and explorers in the “East,” these structures betray their connections to civilization and luxury—these are surrounded by the machinery that provides electricity, air conditioning, complex learning technologies. The mixture of otherworldliness of the white tents rising from the grass, and the mundanity of the technology that (not-so) silently supports them, makes this campus feel unfamiliar. Even cleaner and more pristine than usual, the campus seems to recede into two dimensions, a stage set for a play without main characters or a defined location. This is the campus that COVID made, and the unfamiliar place to which students and faculty are invited to “return.” 

In my next post, I will talk more concretely about my contradictory thoughts about such a return and my own decision to teach, at least for this semester, from home. But this week and this post have made me think about my brief trips to campus to pick up books or files, and about how COVID has turned me into a visitor to what I think of as my own campus. “Visitor” may in fact be an insufficient word to capture the distance I feel; today, as I walked the campus to take pictures for this blog, I felt more like a tourist—connected not so much to the daily life of teaching and learning, but to the campus as a “sight,” on tours of Houston. My amateur cellphone photos (I am trying among other things not to violate copyright) join the thousands of images of Rice that I have consumed—and used—in brochures, advertisements for talks, etc. Even in the pandemic, these images persist and multiply; Rice offers virtual Zoom backgrounds of the campus for those of us with the computer configurations to use for classes or official business. Last week, my colleague sat in front of an image of Rice’s main entrance blooming with spring azaleas, visual compensation, perhaps, for a distant fall. In this image, as in most of the Zoom backgrounds I have seen, the campus is empty, as if the beauties of the campus, even in ordinary times are best appreciated without human figures.

Of course. human figures (and their ghosts) are not the whole story. My colleague and Facebook Friend Cin-Ty Lee reminds me with every post that the campus is always, even and perhaps especially now, full of all kinds of life. A talented photographer and ecologist, Cin-Ty records the life on campus of insects, mammals, birds, and trees. Yesterday, he noted that “just over 1000 Broad-winged Hawks” flew over Rice in a single morning. Some days, like Charles Darwin in his own garden, he turns his gaze to the ground to record what he sees in a designated place. The pandemic might remind us in many ways of other lives lived differently, of places shared in ways we do not always see or understand. Back, I guess, to Latin: the word “campus” derives from the word for “field,” ; no matter how few students I count on my walks, no matter how many faculty have chosen to work from home, no matter how brochures frame what is precious about such places, campuses are by no means empty.