Lost on Campus

.

When I reached the lofty position of “upperclassman” at the small private college in southwestern Michigan where I attended undergraduate school, I occasionally engaged in “spoofing the freshmen.” I have come to learn that our pranks could not even pretend to reach the level of what is now called “hazing” at the nation’s “white shoes” private institutions. But then we were mostly nerds, intellectuals, and artists at Kalamazoo College. There were no fraternities or sororities, just some “social clubs” the nature of which I have forgotten.  Hence, rather than subjecting the freshmen to strange rituals of questionable taste we would attempt to sell them elevator passes. Our campus, founded in 1833, had at that time, no buildings that sported elevators. We chuckled our sardonic upperclassmen chuckles and meandered off across the brick paths that crisscrossed the shade-dappled quadrangle. 

I have returned several times in the four decades since my graduation. The school remains small - around 1500 students and 100 faculty, a ratio to be devoutly desired among the mega-universities that increasingly define American higher education. But even Kalamazoo College has acquired new elevator-equipped buildings among which I can lose my way. So I tend to linger on the quad and pretend that time has somehow faded back to that more simple time. 

NC State, on the other hand, pushes up new buildings like mushrooms suddenly sprouting after a summer storm. One day there is parking lot or a cluster of picturesque, albeit just a shade shabby, old homes. The next a gaudy new structure of brick and glass complete with name plate and academic affiliation squats in their stead. I am occasionally tempted to peer around the foundations to see it any remnants of the former structures oozed out when the current occupant was suddenly dropped upon the site. One would think I would be used to these phenomena. Apparently not. 

Tonight I drove into campus a bit early for my evening class. I needed to pop into the library to pick up a dvd. I parked in the lot across the street, and jay-walked through traffic to slip down the sidewalk that would funnel me around to the library entrance. I was caught up short by a chain link fence behind which glowered the wide toothed maw of a backhoe on steroids. It was perched atop mounds of asphalt that had previously lined the path that led down to the library. It seemed somehow evil, a primordial carnivore guarding its cache. I don’t know why it bothered me so.  I followed the fence around, hoping to slip through it somehow and regain my intended route. No luck. I was shuttled down the street past a shiny new cluster of campus bus stops. They carried signs not unlike the DC metro: blue line here, B and C route over there. Students strode purposely to their appointed spots. I finally broke free around the far end of the library, but only after peering through a window in a weird shot of deja vu that glimpsed down the basement hallway that had, 39 years ago, led to my first office here at State. 

I secured my dvd and set off back to my car, stopping for a moment to glance at the “natural area” that was once the site of Harrelson Hall, a strange round classroom building. Picture the bottom two floors of the leaning tower of Pisa, but without the 12th century architectural appeal. Now it is an open space awaiting, no doubt, its own giant mushroom. I skirted west around the back side of the library and eventually defeated the fencing and made it back to my car. I drove past two immense new apartment buildings, parked across the street from my office, bought a bagel, and hurried inside. 

I am not sure why the experience set me so on edge. Perhaps it was the notion that while I have grown accustomed to new buildings appearing in the urban equivalent of fallow fields, I was unsettled when places I had previously walked with students, friends and colleagues were ripped open to make way for yet another building. Strange, eh? It was as if I had become enured to the idea that one could “pave paradise to put up a parking lot,” but it bothered me when they tore up “my” parking lot to build another building?  I think, more than that, I resented the fact that places with which I had a past were being destroyed in order to create new structures with which, the inevitability of time decrees, I will have no history.  

.