It was one of my first nights at Wooster, but I can feel it happening to me even now. I was sitting cross-legged on the grass, the cool midnight air tempering the heat from my heavy olive jacket. I remember staring greedily at the cigarette and reverently at the girl who held it, the flame from the lighter illuminating her face into relaxed oranges and reds. If I close my eyes, I can feel the warms and cools that were that night: The heat of smoke in my lungs against the cool of the grass against my fingers, the burn on my thumb against the chilly night air, the warmth of a smile against the calm peace of the stars above me. I remember thinking at that moment that she was the person who this college was going to help me become. When I close my eyes, I still think that.
Your back sags as you shove your backpack over your shoulders. It’s heavy, but it’s all essential: Your laptop you need for class. Your binders, for your classes that don’t let you use your laptop. Your charger, because your laptop hasn’t been able to hold a charge for years. Your chips, because you’re not gonna have time to get lunch. And your meds, because you’re not gonna be home around dinnertime to take them. Every day you get out (or roll out, or stagger out, or fall out) of bed, blankly brush your teeth, and make the same trip. Not “walking to class” as transportation, but the ancient mechanistic process of willing one foot in front of another, the rote firing of individual synapses that force your leg to move. You step the same whether on grass, dirt, pavement, or snow. Through torrential rain or uncaring cold, you step. And when you finally get to shelter, tired or hungry or soaking or unshaven or sick or freezing or hungover, you realize that you didn’t make it to class at all. Your body did, though, and that will have to be enough. You do this, apparently, for a degree. Would you do it for love?
You move, but you do not travel. From class to class, from work to Lowry, from a meeting to your dorm. Your days are remarkably fluid: you’re rarely in one place for more than a couple hours, and oftentimes you don’t even see your dorm room at any point between when you wake up in the morning to when you go to sleep at night. You’re more than just your work, you know this: So on the weekends, you make sure to spend your nights going from function to function, collapsing in bed late at night, going hard on the weekends, paying for it on the weekdays. There has to be more to life than just work and sleep.
You can’t live without human connection. You don’t have time for your friends. So you schedule it in: You make appointments, plan dinners, schedule around. You pencil in getting lunch with your friend, right after your 11 AM and right before your meeting with your IS advisor. You don’t have room for anything organic, not anymore. If friendship is to survive, it must be organized, compartmentalized, and mediated. Your friends become another extracurricular.
It was last semester, deep in the cold of winter. The time of year at Wooster when freezing wind sweeps across the quads and snow drifts bury the sidewalks. The preceding week I had been running around from class to class, never getting into bed before midnight the entire week. So I was staying up late, starting a project that was due the next morning. My hope was to work on it until three or four, and maybe get a couple hours of sleep before I dragged myself to class. Instead, I ended up working right up to 8:45, just in time to get to my 9 AM. I remember seeing the sun just peek over the trees around 7, the light blues and brilliant pinks shining strikingly over the crisp white snow. I remember staring at the sunset, just for a second. And then getting back to work.
In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, anthropologist James C. Scott argues that the centrally organized, “high modernist” plans to manage human beings focus only on what these plans look like from above, ignoring how individual people actually interact with them. Scott uses Brasilia, a planned Brazilian city, to elaborate on his ideas, arguing that the city’s planners failed to allow room for social life outside of formally designated social zones: “One striking result of Brasilia’s cityscape is that virtually all the public spaces in the city are officially designated public spaces: the stadium, the theater, the concert hall, the planned restaurants. The smaller, unstructured, informal public spaces—sidewalk cafés, street corners, small parks, neighborhood squares—do not exist” (138). This failure to understand how people actually live in cities created a sense of discomfort in the first generation of Braisila residents. As Scott explains, “they use the term brasilite to refer to their feelings about a daily life without the pleasures—the distractions, conversations, flirtations, and little rituals—of outdoor life in other Brazilian cities. . . Compared to life in Rio and São Paulo, with their color and variety, the daily round in bland, repetitive, austere Brasilia must have resembled life in a sensory deprivation tank” (143).
While obviously different in scale and intensity, the same high modernist logic dictates the planning of Wooster. Of course, Wooster being a college, its designers organize its buildings by function: This building is a residential hall, this building is an academic building. But this functional logic behind student space has only increased over the years. There is a striking difference between the residential halls built from 1907–1935 (such as Babcock Hall, Douglass Hall, and Kenarden Lodge) and the residential halls of the 1950s and 60s (such as Andrews Hall, Armington Hall, and Stevenson Hall). The former include substantial social spaces for students to use as their own, such as the formal lounges in both Babcock and Douglass. The latter feature row after row of identical dorm rooms with common spaces only as an afterthought. By far the worst offender is Armington Hall, being a hall primarily for single student dorm rooms. Armington has a maximum capacity of 106 students, but it’s rare for these students to have had more than a few passing conversations with their neighbors. Indeed, it’s possible for students in Armington to not know a single other person on their floor, apart from maybe their RA. Armington serves its function for the College, serving as a clean and comfortable place for students to sleep and study undisturbed. But the designers of the hall completely neglected the social needs of its residents. The layout of Armington promotes academic success in its residents; it also promotes loneliness.
A similar fate has befallen Lowry Dining Hall. Before the 2020 renovation, Mom’s at Lowry was a popular social spot, where a lot of connections would be made and friendships would be forged. Post-renovation, Mom’s is locked behind the Lowry front register, requiring a meal swipe to get in. This change protects the College from students trying to sneak into the dining hall for free, but essentially eliminates one of the most organic social spaces on campus. While the decision makes sense on the level of the institution, it eliminates the possibility for students to use the space on their own terms.
Ultimately, Brasilia was not the fully planned city that its designers were hoping to build. The construction workers who built the city rejected the assumption that they would leave the city once construction was complete– rather, they ended up settling just outside of the official limits of the planned city, building their own Brasilia outside of the purview of the designers. In the end, some “75 percent of the population of Brasilia lived in settlements that had never been anticipated” (146). The realities of how humans live couldn’t be metered out and planned by an institution. If we want to break out of the confines of how our own lives are organized at Wooster, some transgression might be required.
It was one of my first nights at Wooster, but I can feel it happening to me even now. I remember the vantage point I’d gotten to, where I could see over the roofs of buildings and even further down the hill, down past the city and through the rustling trees. I remember tracing my eyes over and over down that hill, amazed as the school faded away into the city, amazed that the school was not the world, but merely a place. I haven’t seen the school like that in a while. I hope I’ll see it again.
Works Cited
Scott, James C. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 2020.