Tonke groot american college campus aesthetic

SHINY LITTLE THINGS, GOTHIC CASTLES, AND REDWOOD FORESTS: THE AMERICAN COLLEGE CAMPUS AESTHETIC by Tonke Groot S2360675 Master’s Dissertation LAX999M20 20 ECTS Dr.Martinez 8 November, 2018 16100 Words I declare that this dissertation is my own work except where indicated otherwise with proper use of quotes and references. 1 The interactive components of this dissertation are most easily accessible via this project’s own Pinterest board and YouTube playlists, which are accessible via the following links: Pinterest: pin.it/erfok7psuz3rdw YouTube Playlist Chapter Two: www.com/playlist?list=PLkrCGRPUTm AEa38yX2RXRDrume0VFgRCv YouTube Playlist Movie Syllabus: https://www.com/playlist?list=PLkrCG RPUTmAH2S-ieADr0Rdc2vwtCXf_2 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 5 CHAPTER ONE: 16 THE CAMPUS HISTORICIZATION PRINCIPLE CHAPTER TWO: 49 COLLEGE IN THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE CHAPTER THREE: 76 DEMARCATION OF DIFFERENCE CONCLUSION 103 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 113 WORKS CITED 114 3 4 INTRODUCTION 5 Ivy Brisbin is a twenty-nine-year-old orthodontic resident at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her car is plastered with stickers displaying her affection for the University of Michigan, the school some of her closest family members went to. Ever since she graduated from high school in 2008, she has lived a “campus life” at an American university.

Eight years later, on August 21st, 2016, she posted this photo on her Instagram account.1 In the caption, she exclaimed that she still “love[s] being on a college campus.” For Ivy, the college experience has transcended being just a temporary state; it has become more like a permanent lifestyle. For me, the idea of the American college campus carries similar emotional weight. Ever since I lived on such a campus—or perhaps even before that—the quad, dining hall, and dorm room aesthetic has intrigued me. Without being aware of the significance of my own behavior, I excitedly visited four colleges—the University of Virginia, Charleston College, UNC Asheville, and Duke University—during a two-week road trip through the American South last summer.

Only recently, I have started to realize just how powerfully the iconic images of campus landscapes 1 Bold phrases refer to images that are displayed in the photo pages after each chapter. In the digital version, they, along with all the underlined phrases, are hyperlinks. 6 have nestled into my brain. I would be remiss to ignore the significance of my personal American college experience in relation to this project.

Without my own impressions of the vibrant, distinct, and physically imposing character of the college campus and its surrounding culture, I would not have developed the curiosity to pursue a better understanding of the profound, complex, and dynamic relationship between the American college campus and its aficionados. The outside-looking-in quality of my college experience has influenced the scope, tone, and method that characterize this dissertation. After graduating from high school in the Netherlands, I received a partial “inter-cultural scholarship” through Fulbright’s Campus Scholarship Program, allowing me to spend my freshman year of college at Augustana, a small liberal arts school in Rock Island, Illinois.2 Subsequently, I spent two semesters as an exchange student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During these exchanges, I circumvented many of the painstaking attributes of the American college experience.

The 2 Fulbright Center is a non-profit organization whose mission is to “promote mutual understanding between Dutch and American citizens by providing financial assistance for study, research, and teaching and by providing information and advice about study in the US” (Mission of the Fulbright Center). 7 stress of the application process was mostly alleviated by the decidedly temporary nature of the exchanges and the security of a guaranteed place by my home university. Even though exchange trips are expensive and Augustana College’s partial tuition was a financial challenge for my family, I did not accumulate the life-altering debt that many American college graduates grapple with. Moreover, my status as an exchange student—a visitor with the idea of pro-actively and deliberately experiencing the culture of American college life as his prerogative—encouraged me to be hyper-aware of the setting I was in.

Assessing, comparing, and evaluating what it meant to attend college in the U. was inherent to my being there. In that sense, I write this thesis about the American campus from a place of privilege. The otherness of the non- academic quirks of college life—Greek life, athletics, pick-up basketball, house parties, and endless hours of dining hall fun—was perhaps the main object of my attention during my time there.

For me, college was more explicitly an “attraction” than it was for any of my American peers, and the campus was my theme park. When Anne Martínez, my American dissertation advisor, voiced her concern that I might look at the “shiny little things” of American college life 8 through rose colored glasses, her warning rang true in ways that I could not change. Of course, the expensive American higher education system was never my only path towards a college degree. Of course, I was not part of a society in which large segments of the population grow up learning they do not belong in a university setting because of its social and economic exclusivity.

Of course, detached from normalcy, the pop cultural symbols of “college life” loomed larger in my imagination than in those of my American peers. Instead of letting my outsider status discourage me from writing about this subject, however, I realized that by zooming in on precisely that showy, outward, and visual side of the campus with a critical eye, this dissertation approaches the American college experience from a foreign, unusual, and productive angle that is unfamiliar in the current climate of U. higher education scholarship. Because I had been so aware of the novelty of my visual environment, I noticed the incredibly rich, careful, and fascinating cultivation and curation of a campus aesthetic that takes place at American universities.

The institution of higher education is responsible for—forgive me for the platitude—the future of America’s youth. Therefore, it is unsurprising and understandable that writers have primarily focused 9 on its most obvious challenges: improving the quality of education, the problem of surging tuition costs, and the inequality of access. These three enormously complex and multifaceted issues invite an infinite number of additional questions: What is the purpose of education? How important is preparation for the job market vis à vis educating young adults to become “good citizens”? How much is a college degree worth? Is a college education still the best strategy in a rapidly changing society? What role does race play in the current system of higher education? In this maze of educational challenges, the “shiny little things” of American higher education have, exactly as this somewhat condemning phrase suggests, mostly been regarded as cutesy, but superficial and extra- curricular characteristics of American higher education. This dissertation makes the case for the relevance of the visual tradition of the American college campus.

While it is hardly controversial to claim that the campus is a recognizable symbol of American culture, the specific mechanics behind the development of that symbol have been insufficiently explored. More importantly, the significant connective tissue between the seemingly trivial visual culture of the college campus and the 10 major issues facing higher education has not yet been appropriately mapped. By interpreting the aesthetic identity of the campus through a postmodern lens, I argue that the deeply flawed, yet unmistakably intriguing and rich character of the American college is the result of a very specific national history and ideology. Theoretical perspectives from Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Herbert Marcuse, and others offer a framework that help to understand the college campus as a dynamic, complex, and ideologically divisive consumer product.

Since the early development of higher education in the United States in the late seventeenth century, I propose, the college campus has manifested itself profoundly as a hyperreal, ultra-visual, and deeply American material practice. The biggest initial challenge of this project has been to appropriately define the scope of my research. The overwhelming majority of college campus scholarship deals with the educational, functional, or architectural development of one specific campus, but my proposition is to treat “the college campus” as a universal entity in the Platonian sense of the word.3 When Paul Turner was working on a 3 See e. Moore and Russell for examples of such specific college campus scholarship.

11 comprehensive history of the architecture of the “college campus” in the 1980s, he ran into a similar scope problem. He noticed that historians “have given little attention to American college planning. Except for studies of the architecture of individual schools and portions of books written by planners on how to design colleges, almost nothing has been published on the history of the campus” (4). In this observation, Turner treats “the campus” linguistically congruously to the way I propose to write about it.

In his attempt to produce a comprehensive study of the American college campus, he realized that he needed to write about it as a singular, self-contained symbol. Although he never specifically mentions it, the fact that he discusses the overarching unity of such a large, multifaceted, and diverse subject is in large part what drove his book. In the introduction of his book American Places: In Search of the Twenty-first Century Campus, Perry M. Chapman disagrees with Turner’s proposition.

He claims that “[n]o two campuses are alike,” and argues that when we look at campuses around the country “to find tangible expressions of what it is that makes the American campus a special place, we are confronted with a staggering range of campus forms and settings” (xxvii). While the “archetypical images that people associate with the traditional American campus— 12 broad green quadrangles, Gothic archways, bell towers, grand library reading rooms—can be found in abundance in all parts of the country,” Chapman posits that “the physical forms of the country’s 4,000 college campuses follow no single formula” (xxvii). Chapman astutely highlights the enormous variety that exists in the spectrum of college campus architecture, but I object to his notion that there is no overarching sameness between campuses; even between those that are situated in a completely different climate, state, and overall setting. Instead, I maintain that American college campuses speak a common aesthetic language.

This dissertation introduces the American college campus as a complex, but uniform entity, and elaborates on the friction between inclusion and exclusion, beauty and reality, sameness and difference, uniqueness and uniformity, and between the individual and collective experience that campus discourse initiates. This dissertation has three chapters. The first chapter introduces the peculiar relationship between the college campus and “history.” Going back to the colonial college, this chapter discusses some of the historical forces that have helped to shape the visual college to what it is now. In addition to these historical connections, I introduce 13 the idea that American campus planners have often tried to add a fascinating artificial layer of “history” to the campuses they design, making the American college doubly “historical.” In chapter two, I present the college campus’ visual identity as a product of America’s specific natural-geographical, socio-economic, and cultural infrastructure.

Through an exploration of America’s physical geography and its tradition of transcendentalist philosophy, I untangle the complex relationship between the college campus and the American landscape. In the final chapter, I connect the previously established characteristics of the college campus template to the challenges of higher education in the United States today. I argue that the aesthetic environment of the college campus is a symbolically explosive, emotionally ambiguous, and highly impactful setting that feels safe, connective, and rewarding to some, but dangerous, detached, and alienating to others. 14 15 CHAPTER ONE: THE CAMPUS HISTORICIZATION PRINCIPLE 16 “There is no spell more powerful to recall the memories of college life than the word Campus.

van Dyke Jr., 1879 (The Princeton Book 375) 17 In America, his unique philosophical dissection of the U., Jean Baudrillard claims that Americans maintain a difficult relationship with the concept of history.